Transcript of Secret Meeting Between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Transcript of secret meeting

between Julian Assange and

Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Friday April 19, 2013

On the 23 of June, 2011 a secret five hour meeting took place between

WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who was under house arrest in rural

UK at the time and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Also in attendance was Jared Cohen, a former Secretary of State advisor

to Hillary Clinton, Scott Malcomson, Director of Speechwriting for

Ambassador Susan Rice at the US State Department and current

Communications Director of the International Crisis Group, and Lisa

Shields, Vice President of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Schmidt and Cohen requested the meeting, they said, to discuss ideas for

"The New Digital World", their forthcoming book to be published on

April 23, 2013.

We provide here a verbatim transcript of the majority of the meeting; a

close reading, particularly of the latter half, is revealing.

You can download the recording here (ogg)

[beginning of tape]

Well do you want us to start eating?ES

Well, we can do both.JA

Yeah, is that ok?ES

Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO ... https://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt.html

1 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

So this is... what's the date?JA

June 23rdLS

...June 23rd. This is a recording between Julian Assange,

Eric Schmidt and...?JA

Lisa ShieldsLS

...Lisa Shields. To be used in a book by Eric Schmidt,

due to be published by Knopf in October 2012. I have

been given a guarantee that I will see the transcript and

will be able to adjust it for accuracy and clarity.

JA

Can we start... I want to talk a little about Thor. Right.

The sort of, the whole Navy network and...ES

Tor or Thor?JA

Yeah, actually I mean Tor. Uh...ES

And Odin as well.JA

That's right, sorry. Tor, uh, and the Navy network, and I

don't actually understand how all of that worked. And the

reason I'm mentioning this is I'm...I'm fundamentally

interested in what happens with that technology as it

evolves. Right. And so, the problem I would assert, is

that if you're trying to receive data you need to have a

guarantee of anonymity to the sender, you need to have a

secure channel to the recipient, the recipient needs to be

replicated, you know... What I'd like you to do is if you

could just talk a bit about that architecture, what you did

in WikiLeaks technically, you know, with the sort of the

technical innovations that were needed and maybe also

what happens. You know, how does it evolve?

Technology always evolves.

ES


2 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

Let me first frame this. I looked at something that I had

seen going on with the world. Which is that I thought

there were too many unjust acts.

JA

OKES

And I wanted there to be more just acts, and fewer unjust

acts. And one can sort of say, well what are your

philosophical axioms for this? And I say I do not need to

consider them. This is simply my temperament. And it is

an axiom because it is that way. And so that avoids, then,

getting into further unhelpful discussions about why you

want to do something. It is enough that I do. So in

considering how unjust acts are caused and what tends to

promote them and what promotes just acts I saw that

human beings are basically invariant. That is that their

inclinations and biological temperament haven't changed

much over thousands of years and so therefore the only

playing field left is: what do they have? And what do

they know? And "have" is something that is fairly hard to

influence, so that is what resources do they have at their

disposal? And how much energy they can harness, and

what are the supplies and so on. But what they know can

be affected in a nonlnear way because when one person

conveys information to another they can convey on to

another and another and so on in a way that nonlinear

and so you can affect a lot of people with a small amount

of information. And therefore you can change the

behaviour of many people with a small amount of

information. So the question then arises as to what kinds

of information will produce behaviour which is just? And

disincentivise behaviour which is unjust? So all around

the world there are people observing different parts of

what is happening to them locally. And there are other

people that are receiving information that they haven't

observed first hand. And in the middle there are people

who are involved in moving information from the

observers to the people who will act on information.

These are three separate problems that are all coupled

together. I felt that there was a difficulty in taking

observations and putting them in an efficient way into a

JA


3 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

distribution system which could then get this information

to people who could act upon it. And so you can argue

that companies like Google are involved, for example, in

this "middle" business of taking... of moving information

from people who have it to people who want it. The

problem I saw was that this first step was crippled. And

often the last step as well when it came to information

that governments were inclined to censor. We can look at

this whole process as the Fourth Estate. Or just as

produced by the Fourth Estate. And so you have some

kind of... pipeline... and... So I have this description

which is... which is partly derived from my experiences

in quantum mechanics about looking at the flow of

particular types of information which will effect some

change in the end. The bottleneck to me appeared to me

to be primarily in the acquisition of information that

would go on to produce changes that were just. In a

Fourth Estate context the people who acquire information

are sources. People who work information and distribute

it are journalists and publishers. And people who act on

it... is everyone. So that's a high level construct, but of

course it then comes down to practically how do you

engineer a system that solves that problem? And not just

a technical system, but a total system. So WikiLeaks was

and is an attempt - although still very young - at a total

system.

For all three phases?ES

To deal with... not for all three phases but for the political

component, the philosophical component and the

engineering component in pushing out first component.

Politically that means anonymizing and protecting...

Sorry. Technically that means anonymizing and

protecting sources in a wide variety of ways. Politically

that also means protecting them politically, and

incentivizing them in a political manner. Saying that their

work is valuable, and encouraging people to take it up.

And then there is also a legal aspect. What are the best

laws that can be created in the best jurisdictions to

operate this sort of stuff from? And practical everyday

JA


4 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

legal defense. On the technical front, our first prototype

was engineered for a very adverse situation where

publishing would be extremely difficult and our only

effective defense in publishing would be anonymity.

Where sourcing is difficult. As it still currently is for the

national security sector. And where internally we had a

very small and completely trusted team.

So publishing means the question of the site itself? And

making the material public?ES

Yeah. Making the primary source material public. That is

what I mean by publishing.JA

So the first step was to make that correctly.ES

It was clear to me that all over the world publishing is a

problem. And... Whether that is through self censorship

or overt censorship.

JA

Sorry, just you're gonna have to... is that because of fear

of retribution by the governments, you know? Or all...ES

It's mostly self censorship. In fact I would say it's

probably the most significant one, historically, has been

economic censorship. Where it is simply not profitable to

publish something. There is no market for it. That is I

describe as a censorship pyramid. It's quite interesting.

So, on the top of the pyramid there are the murders of

journalists and publishers. And the next level there is

political attacks on journalists and publishers. So you

think, what is a legal attack? A legal attack is simply a

delayed use of coercive force.

JA

Sure.ES

Which doesn't necessarily result in murder but may result

in incarceration or asset seizure. So the next level down,

and remember the volume... the area of the pyramid....

volume of the pyramid! The volume of the pyramid

JA


5 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

increases significantly as you go down from the peak.

And in this example that means that the number of acts

of censorship also increases as you go down. So there are

very few people who are murdered, there are a few

people who suffer legal... there is a few number of public

legal attacks on individuals and corporations, and then at

the next level there is a tremendous amount of self

censorship, and this self censorship occurs in part

because people don't want to move up into the upper

parts of the pyramid. They don't want to come to legal

attacks or uses of coercive force. But they also don't want

to be killed.

Right. I see.ES

So that discourages people from behaving... and then

there are other forms of self censorship that are

concerned about missing out on business deals, missing

out on promotions and those are even more significant

because they are lower down the pyramid. At the very

bottom - which is the largest volume - is all those people

who cannot read, do not have access to print, do not have

access to fast communications or where there is no

profitable industry in providing that. Okay. So we

decided to deal with the top of this censorship pyramid.

The top two sections: the threats of violence, and the

delayed threats of violence that are represented by the

legal system. In some ways that is the hardest case. In

some ways it is the easiest case. It is the easiest case

because it is clear cut when things are being censored

there, or not. It is also the easiest because the volume of

censorship is relatively small, even if the per event

significance is very high. So in... Before WikiLeaks

had... although of course I had some previous political

connections of my own from other activities, we didn't

have that many friends. We didn't have significant

political allies. And we didn't have a worldwide audience

that was looking to see how we were doing. So we took

the position that we would need to have a publishing

system whose only defense was anonymity. That is it had

no financial defense, it had no legal defense, and it had

JA


6 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

no political defense. Its defenses were purely technical.

So that meant a system that was distributed at its front

with many domain names and a fast ability to change

those domain names. A caching system, and at the back

tunnelling through the Tor network to hidden servers...

So... if I could talk just a little bit about this, so... You

could switch DNS... your website names very quickly,

you use the tunnelling to get back... to communicate

among these replicas? Or this is for distribution?

ES

We had sacrificial front nodes, that were very fast to set

up, very quick to set up, that we nonetheless did place in

relatively hospitable jurisdictions like Sweden. And those

fast front nodes were fast because there was no... very

few hops between them and the people reading them.

That's... an important lesson that I had learned from

things that I did before, that being a Sherman tank is not

always an advantage, because you are not manouevrable

and you are slow. A lot of the protection for publishers is

publishing quickly. You get the information out quickly it

is very well read, the incentive for people to go after you

in relation to that specific piece of information is actually

zero. There may be incentives for them to go after you to

teach a lesson to other people who might defy their

authority or teach a future lesson to your organization

about defiance of authority.

JA

So, again, in constructing the argument you were

concerned that governments or whatever would attack

the front ends of this thing through whatever... denial of

service attacks or blocking, basically filtering them out,

which is essentially is commonly done. So an important

aspect of this was to always be available.

ES

Always be available in one particular way or another.

Now that's not a.. it's a battle that we have mostly won

but we haven't completely won it. Within a few weeks

the Chinese government had handed us to their ban list.

We had hundreds of domain names, of various sorts, the

domain names that were registered with very very large

DNS providers, so if there was IP level based filtering it

JA


7 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[background noise. JC entering]

would whack out another five hundred thousand domains

and that would create a political back pressure that would

undo it. However DNS based filtering still hits us in

China because the most common names - the ones that

are closest to "WikiLeaks" - the name that people can

communicate easily - they are all filtered by the Chinese

government.

Of course they are.ES

And any domain with "WikiLeaks" anywhere in it, no

matter where it is, is filtered. So that means there has to

be a variant that they haven't yet discovered. But

people... the variant has to be known widely enough for

people to go there. So there is a catch 22.

JA

That's a structural problem with the naming of the

internet, but the Chinese would simply do content

filtering on you.

ES

Well, HTTPS worked for about a year and a half.JA

Okay.ES

Worked quite well actually. And then changing up IPs,

because they were... the Chinese internet filtering system

is quite baroque, and they have evolved it... sometimes

they do things manually and sometimes they do it in an

automated way, in terms of adding IPs to the list based

on domain names, and then we did... we had a quite

interesting battle where we saw that they were looking up

our IPs, and we see that these requests came from a

certain DNS block range in China. Whenever we saw

that we just then returned...

JA

Ha ha ha ha ha. That's clever. Ha ha ha ha ha.ES


8 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

...different IPs. I was actually thinking we could return

Public Security Bureau IPs!JA

This is Jared Cohen, by the way.ES

Hi, I'm so sorry we're late. Flight delay and...JC

Pleased to meet you.JA

Was it United or was it?ES

Uh, Delta. Never flying again!JC

Yeah, that's Delta.ES

Hi!LS

Larry?JA

Jared.JC

Jared! Jared.JA

And this is Scott.ES

Nice to meet you!SM

Scott is our editor.ES

Sorry, we're an hour and a half late.SM


9 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[Chatter]

[chatter]

That's alright!JA

We're actually, we could use...ES

It's a useful day to drive!JA

We've actually been having a perfectly wonderful time.ES

I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm sure.SM

Why don't you just. Scott sit there, and then you sit here,

next to me...LS

Are you joining us?SM

Julian was kind enough... we... did not bring a tape

recorder!LS

Ha ha ha ha ha...ES

Quite embarrassing that you're you ask to interview

someone and you have to borrow a tape recorder.LS

Um!JC

A friend of mine did an interview...JA

Hi!LS


10 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[laughter]

...in Fiji, the staff of... during General Rabuka's coup.

Where he had General Rabuka's second in command

admit, on tape, that the CIA had paid him off...

JA

Wow.JC

... and he got back. And he was like, yes! This is the

story of the decade! And the tape had failed. I have a few

of these. You should always...

JA

Always always have your own...JC

For Scott and Jared, we spent a fair amount of time just

sort of chatting about Google, and I went up to introduce

Lisa... I failed to properly articulate what a brilliant book

we are working on.

ES

Ha ha ha!LS

And Lisa assisted me. And we seem to be ok with her

assist. What we agreed was that we would talk about the

technology directions and maybe the implications of all

of this, and the deal was that it would be on the record

for the book. We would have a transcript prepared, which

he would have an opportunity to modify and improve its

clarity, which all seemed incredible reasonable to me. So

we just started talking a little bit about... we talked a little

bit about sort of the general principles he's articulated

and I was just starting to talk a little bit about the

structure, why WikiLeaks is architected the way it is.

And the rough summary there is that, the concern that he

had in architecting this was that if you look at the

governments you know the sort of the stuff that they do,

murder journalists, imprison journalists and that kind of

stuff, his view was that we want to attack that problem

by making a system that was very very hard to block. So

ES


11 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

JA playing with Tomato on table],

the non technical explanation of what he did is that if you

built a system where if they do the obvious things to

block them it can essentially show up in another way.

Change its name and replicate...

We developed an internal system to do some of these fast

replicas. Not quite unsophisticated, but worked quickly.

But I think this is... I've been thinking about this for a

while now. I think there is... The naming of things is very

important. The naming of human intellectual work and

our entire intellectual record is possibly the most

important thing. So we all have words for different

objects, like "tomato." But we use a simple word,

"tomato," instead of actually describing every little

aspect of this god damn tomato...

JA

...because it takes too long. And because it takes too long

to describe this tomato precisely we use an abstraction so

we can think about it so we can talk about it. And we do

that also when we use URLs. Those are frequently used

as a short name for some human intellectual content. And

we build all of our civilization, other than on bricks, on

human intellectual content. And so we currently have

system with URLs where the structure we are building

our civilization out of is the worst kind of melting

plasticine imaginable. And that is a big problem.

JA

And you would argue a different name-space structure,

involving... properly...ES

I think there is a fundamental confusion, an overloading

of the current URL.JA

Yep. Absolutely.ES

So, on the one hand we have live dynamic services and

organizations... well there's three things. Live dynamic

services. Organizations that run those services, so that

JA


12 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

you are referring to a hierarchy. You are referring to a

system of control. An organization, a government, that

represents an organized evolving group. And on the other

hand you have artefacts. You have human intellectual

artefacts that have the ability to be completely

independent from any system of human control. They are

out there in the Platonic realm somehow. And shouldn't

in fact be referred to by an organization. They should be

referred to in a way that is intrinsic to the intellectual

content, that arises out of the intellectual content! I think

that is an inevitable and very important way forward, and

where this... where I saw that this was a problem was

dealing with a man by the name of Nahdmi Auchi. A few

years ago was listed by one of the big business

magazines in the UK as the fifth richest man in the UK.

In 1980 left Iraq. He'd grown rich under Saddam

Hussein's oil industry. And is alleged by the Italian press

to be involved in a load of arms trading there, he has over

two hundred companies run out of his Luxembourg

holding unit. And several that we discovered in Panama.

He had infiltrated the British Labour political

establishment to the degree that the 20th business

birthday in London he was given a painting signed by

146 members Commons including Tony Blair. He's the

same guy who was the principal financier of Tony

Rezko. Tony Rezko was the financier and fundraiser of

Rod Blagoyevich, from Chicago. Convicted of

corruption. Tony Rezko has been convicted of

corruption. And Barack Obama. He was the intermediary

who helped Barack Obama buy one of his houses and

then the money not directly for the house but it bouyed

up Tony Rezko's finances came from that... [indistinct].

So during the - this is detail, but it will get to a point.

During the 2008 presidential primaries a lot of attention

was turned to Barack Obama by the US press,

unsurprisingly. And so it started to look into his

fundraisers, and discovered Tony Rezko, and then they

just started to turn their eyes towards Nadhmi Auchi.

Auchi then hired Carter Ruck, a rather notorious firm of

London libel solicitors, whose founder, Carter Ruck, has

been described as doing for freedom of speech what the

Boston strangler did for door to door salesmen.


13 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[laughter]

And he started writing letters to all of the London papers

who had records of his 2003 extradition to France and

conviction for corruption in France over the

Elf-Acquitaine scandal. Where he had been involved in

taking kickbacks on selling the invaded Kuwaiti

governments' oil refineries in order to fund their

operations while Iraq had occupied it. So the Guardian

pulled three articles from 2003. So they were five years

old. They had been in the Guardian's archive for 5 years.

Without saying anything. If you go to those URLs you

will not see "removed due to legal threats." You will see

"page not found." And one from the Telegraph. And a

bunch from some American publications. And bloggers,

and so on. Important bits of history, recent history, that

were relevant to an ongoing presidential campaign in the

United States were pulled out of the intellectal record.

They were also pulled out of the Guardian's index of

articles. So why? The Guardian's published in print, and

you can go to the library and look up those articles. They

are still there in the library. How would you know that

they were there in the library? To look up, because they

are not there in the Guardian's index. Not only have they

ceased to exist, they have ceased to have ever existed.

Which is the modern implementation of Orwell's dictum

that he controls the present controls the past and he who

controls the past controls the future. Because the past is

stored physically in the present. All records of the past.

This issue of preserving politically salient intellectual

content while it is under attack is central to what

WikiLeaks does -- because that is what we are after! We

are after those bits that people are trying to suppress,

because we suspect, usually rightly, that they're

expending economic work on suppressing those bits

because they perceive that they are going to induce some

change.

JA

So it's the evidence of the suppression that you look for

in order to determine value?JC


14 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

Yeah, that is a very good - not precisely - but it is a very

good...JA

Well, tell me precisely. Ha ha.JC

Well, it's not precise... it's not always right. It's a very

suggestive...JA

It's not perfect!ES

It's not perfect. It is a very suggestive signal that the

people who know the information best - ie. the people

who wrote it - are spending economic work in preventing

it going into the historical record, preventing it going into

the public. Why spend so much work doing that? It's

more efficient to just let everyone have it. You don't have

to spend time guarding it, but also you are more efficient

in terms of your organization because all the positive

unintended consequences of the information going

around can come out. So...

JA

No no no, I wanted water, but Eric took mine. Ha ha.JC

So we selectively go after the information, and that

information is selectively suppressed inside organizations

and very frequently if it is a powerful group as soon as

someone tries to publish it it is also suppressed.

JA

So, just, I want to know a bit more about the technology.

So in this structure, you basically have a, you basically

can put up a new front very quickly and you have stored

replicas that are distributed. One of the questions I have

is how do you decide which ISPs...

ES

OK. That's a very good question.JA

Yeah, it is a pretty complicated question.ES


15 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

Yeah, so I will give you an example of how not to choose

them. So we dealt with a case in the Cacos islands where

there was a great little group called the TCI journal. The

Turks and Cacos Islands Journal, which is sort of a best

use case of the internet. So who are they? Well they are a

bunch of legal reformers, logically minded people in the

Turks and Cacos islands, who lived there, who saw that

overseas property developers were coming in and

somehow getting crowned land, very cheaply and

building big high rises on it and so on. They were

campaigning for good governance and trying to expose

these people. It's a classic best use case for the internet.

Cheap publication means that we can have many more

types of publishers. Which means that you can have self

subsidizing publishers. So you can have people that are

able to publish purely for ideological reasons or for

altruistic reasons, because the costs of altruism in relation

to publishing are not so high that you cannot do it. They

were hounded out of the Turks and Caicos islands pretty

quickly. And they moved their servers to India. The

Turkish property developer they had been busy exposing

then hired correspondent lawyers in London who hired

correspondent lawyers in India who hounded them out of

their ISP there, they then moved to Malaysia, they got

hounded out same deal there. The ISP, they became non

profitable to the ISP as soon as the legal letters started

coming in. They went to the US, and once they were in

the US their US ISP didn't fold - they picked one of the

better ones - and it didn't collapse as fast. However it was

noticed that they were using a Gmail address. The editors

were anonymous because of the threats. Who was the

responsible party? It was anonymous, although their

columnists often were not. And so a suit was filed in

California, and as part of filing suit they started issuing

subpoenas. They issued a subpoena for Gmail. And the

result was that Gmail... Google told them that they had to

come to California to defend, otherwise it would be

handed over. These are little guys in the Turks and

Caicos Islands trying to stop corruption in their country

against property developer with hundreds of millions.

How can they go to California to fight off a libel suit, to

fight off a subpoena which is part of a bogus libel suit?

JA


16 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

Well, of course they can't go. We managed to arrange

some lawyers for them and there just happened to be a

nice little bit of the California statute code that addressed

this precise situation which is when someone publishes

something and then a subpoena is issued to try and get

their identity--you can't do it and you've got to pay costs.

That was a nice little legal hook that someone had

introduced.

The problem is..ES

And Google didn't send any lawyers to help them either!JA

Yeah, we guessed... [indistinct] entertainment industry in

California.JC

That's an example of what happens if you have pretty

bright guys; they had a good Indian technical guy. They

had bright political guys. You have a decent technical

guy, you have decent political guys, you come together to

try and fix corruption in your country using the internet

as a publishing mechanism, what happens? You are

hounded, from one end of the earth to the other! These

guys were lucky enough that they had enough resources

that they could survive this hounding, and they ended up

finding some friends and settling into a position where

they are alright. For us this was a matter of looking at

what ISPs had survived pressure, also because I was

connected to this role of politics and technology and

anticensorship for a long time and I knew some of the

players. So we had friends at ISPs, within the ISPs, that

if you like we had already ideologically infiltrated so we

knew that they would fight in our corner if there was a

request come in and we knew if there was a decent

chance that subpoenas were served, even with a gag

order, we'd soon find out about it. So how can someone

do it who is not in that world. Well the answer is, not

easily. You can look at ISPs that WikiLeaks has used or

is currently using, or that the Pirate Bay has used, or

other groups that are tremendously under attack. In the

case of this little ISP, and it is often a little ISP that is

JA


17 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

fighting, take the little ISP PRQ in Sweden that was

founded by Gottfried, whose nickname is Anakata, he is

one of the technical brains behind the Pirate Bay, so they

had developed a niche industry, also Bahnhof an ISP in

Sweden of dealing with refugee publishers, and that is

the correct word for it, the correct phrase for it, that they

are publishing refugees. They had at that time other than

us Malaysia Today, which had to flee, the American

Homeowner's Association, which had to flee -- from

property developers in the United States, the Cavatz

Centre, a Caucasian, a Caucus news center which is

constantly under attack by the Russians. In fact PRQ was

raided several times by the Swedish government under

pressure from the Russian government. The Rick Ross

institute on destructive cults, an American based outfit

had been sued out of America by Scientology and so on.

Huh huh, huh huh huhJC

Hhm hm hmES

Huh huh. WowJC

Malaysia Today, run by a wonderful guy by the name of

Raja Petra who, he has two arrest warrants out for him in

Malaysia, he is based in London, but his servers can't

survive in London, they are in Singapore and the United

States.

JA

But again, I get the, the, that's [indistinct] there are sites

that participate in this?ES

Yes, we have some fourteen hundred, but those are... we

have mirrors that are voluntary as well asJA

So they basically opt-in mirror sites.ES

They determine their own risks, we don't know anything

about them, we can't guarantee that they are allJA


18 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

trustworthy, etc, but they do increase the numbers.

You have been quoted in the press as saying that there is

a much larger store of information that is encrypted and

distributed. Is it distributed in those sorts of places?

ES

No, that's an open... we openly distribute backups of...

encrypted backups of materials that we view are highly

sensitive that we are to publish in the coming year.

JA

Got it.ES

Not as some people have said so that we have a

"thermonuclear device" to use on our opponents. But

rather so that there is very little possibility that that

material, even if we are completely wiped out, will be

taken from the historical record.

JA

So, so and eventually you will reveal the key that is

necessary to decrypt it.ES

No, ideally, we will never reveal the key.JA

I see.ES

Because there is things, like, so redactions sometimes

need to be done on this material.JA

Sure.ES

So it's... our view is that the material is so significant that

even if we released it as is, with no redactions, that the

benefits would outweight the harms. But through

redacting things we can get the harm down even more.

JA

And I understand that. One more sort of tactical question

for now. So, my simple explanation is that the tools will

get better for an anonymous sender send to a distrustful

ES


19 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

recipient, and then this anonymous [noise] your

describing. We will get to the point where the... a very

large amount of people using such services for all sorts

of reasons: truthful, lying, manipulation, what have you.

The current technology used... basically, like FTP

[indistinct] runners sent to you. Basically people will

FTP something and then just sort of ship it to you.

No we have... we have lots of different paths. And that's

quite deliberate. And we don't say which one is used

more than which other one, because that means that

investigative resources have to be spread across all

possible paths. But they are from in-person, in the mail.

Postal mail is still actually pretty good if you want to

send anonymous stuff. Encrypt something to a key, if you

think it might be intercepted on the way, send it from

somewhere, it's still pretty good. Straight HTTPS

uploads, although they are not actually sort of straight.

But to the user it looks like they are straight. Behind the

scenes all sorts of other stuff is going on. The biggest

problem with computer security is not communication.

It's end points.

JA

Right.ES

And so dealing with end point attacks both on someone

trying to send us information and more importantly if

someone tries to send us information is themselves

compromised, that's one compromise of one person. If

our engine that receives information is compromised,

that is a potential compromise of every person that is

trying to send us material.

JA

I guess I... I didn't ask my question quite right. If the... Is

there some new technology which in your view would

kind of materially change this simple model that I have

about, of the vast increase of...

ES

Yes! So I've...JA


20 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

So what are those technologies?ES

The most important one is naming things properly. If we

are able to name some... a video file or a piece of text in

a way that is intrinsically coupled to the information

there, so that there is no ambiguity-- a hash is an example

of this--but then there's variations, maybe you want one

that human beings can actually remember. Then it

permits this information to be spread in such a way

where you don't have to trust the underlying networks.

And you can flood it.

JA

Why don't you have to trust the underlying networks?ES

Well because you can sign... you can sign the hashes.JA

You can sign the name as well as the content.ES

You can sign the hash.JA

You can sign the hash.ES

And that's the hash. If a name is like a hash.JA

So it's... it's unambiguous as to whether...ES

Yes.JA

You're basically saying you have a provable name...ES

Yeah.JA

As opposed to an alterable name.ES


21 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

And those sorts of mechanisms are evolving now. We

have been using something like this internally, I've been

writing a paper on it to try and make this a standard for

everyone. But you can see they are actually evolving. If

we look at magnet links... have you seen these? There is

an enhancement of BitTorrent, which is a magnet link,

and a magnet link is actually a hash.

JA

Right right.ES

So it is hash addressing. It doesn't point to any particular

server, rather there is a big hash tree.. a distributed hash,

three over... I don't know how technical I should get...

There is a big distributed hash tree over many millions of

computers involved in thee hashtree, and many many

entry points into this hashtree so it is very hard to censor.

And the addressing for content is on the hash of the

content.

JA

Right so you are basically doing the hash as the address,

and you do the addressing within the namespace to

provide... so as long as you have a signed...

ES

As long as you get the hash...JA

...you can't hide it.ES

Well, there's a question as to you've got a name of

something, you've got a hash, but what does that tell you.

Nothing really, because it is not really human readable.

So you need another mechanism to get the fact that that's

important to you.

JA

Sure.ES

And that is something like WikiLeaks signs that, and

says that that is...JA


22 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

An interesting piece of informationES

...an interesting piece of information, and we have

verified that it is true. But that, once you feed that

information into the system then it becomes very unclear

how it got into the system. Well how do you get rid of it

from the system? And if you do get rid of it, if someone

does manage to get rid of it, you know for sure that it's

been gotten rid of, because the hash doesn't resolve to

anything anymore. Similarly, if someone were to modify

it, the hash changes...

JA

I was just gonna say, why wouldn't they just rename it,

rather than...JC

They can't because the name is intrinsically coupled to

the intellectual content.JA

I think the way to explain this... To summarise the

technical idea is... take all the content in a document,

come up with a number, so if the content is gone, the

number doesn't match, show anything. And if the content

has changed, the number doesn't compute right anymore.

So it is an interesting property.

ES

Mm hm. So...JC

So...JA

So how far are we from this type of system?ES

On the publishing end, the magnet links and so on are

starting to come up. There's also a very nice little paper

that I've seen in relation to Bitcoin, that... you know

about Bitcoin?

JA

No.ES


23 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[laughter]

Okay, Bitcoin is something that evolved out of the

cypherpunks a couple of years ago, and it is an

alternative... it is a stateless currency.

JA

Yeah, I was reading about this just yesterday.JC

And very important, actually. It has a few problems. But

its innovations exceed its problems. Now there has been

innovations along these lines in many different paths of

digital currencies, anonymous, untraceable etc. People

have been experimenting with over the past 20 years.

The Bitcoin actually has the balance and incentives right,

and that is why it is starting to take off. The different

combination of these things. No central nodes. It is all

point to point. One does not need to trust any central

mint. If we look at traditional currencies such as gold, we

can see that they have sort of interesting properties that

make them valuable as a medium of exchange. Gold is

divisible, it is easy to chop up, actually out of all metals

it is the easiest to chop up into fine segments. You can

test relatively easily whether it is true or whether it is

fake. You can take chopped up segments and you can put

them back together by melting the gold. So that is what

makes it a good medium of exchange and it is also a

good medium of value store, because you can take it and

put it in the ground and it is not going to decay like

apples or steaks. The problems with traditional digital

currencies on the internet is that you have to trust the

mint not to print too much of it.

JA

And the incentives for the mint to keep printing are

pretty high actually, because you can print free money.

That means you need some kind of regulation. And if

you're gonna have regulation then who is going to

enforce the regulation, now all of a sudden you have

sucked in the whole problem of the state into this issue,

and political pushes here and there, and who can get

JA


24 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

control of the mint, push it one way or another, for

particular purposes. Bitcoin instead has an algorithm

where the anyone can create, anyone can be their own

mint. They're basically just searching for collisions with

hashes.. A simple way is... they are searching for a

sequence of zero bits on the beginning of the thing. And

you have to randomly search for, in order to do this. So

there is a lot of computational work in order to do this.

And each Bitcoin software that is distributed.. That work

algorithmically increases as time goes by. So the

difficulty in producing Bitcoins becomes harder and

harder and harder as time goes by and it is built into the

system.

Right, right. That's interesting.ES

Just like the difficulty in mining gold becomes harder

and harder and harder and that is what makes people

predict that there is not going to be a sudden amount of

gold in the market, rather...

JA

To enforce the scarcity...ES

Yeah, to enforce scarcity, and scarcity will go up as time

goes by, and what does that mean for incentives in going

into the Bitcoin system. That means that you should get

into the Bitcoin system now. Early. You should be an

early adopter. Because your Bitcoins are going to be

worth a lot of money one day. So once you have a... and

the Bitcoins are just... a Bitcoin address is just a big hash.

It's a hash of a public key that you generate. So once you

have this hash you can just advertise it to everyone, and

people can send you Bitcoins, and there is people who

have set up exchanges to convert from Bitcoin to US

dollars and so on. And it solves a very interesting

technical problem, which is how do you stop double

spending?

All digital material can be cloned, almost zero costs, so if

you have currency as a digital string of numbers, how do

you stop me... I want to buy this piece of pasta.

JA


25 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[JA using lunch table objects]

Here is my digital currency and, now I take a copy of it.

And now I want to buy your bit of egg. And then you

go... and now I want to buy your radish! And you go,

what? I've already got that! What's going on here?

There's been some fraud! So there's a synchronization

problem. Who now has the coin? So there is a point to

point.. a spread network with all these problems, some

points of the network being faster, some points of the

network being slower, multiple paths of communication,

how do you solve this synchronization issue about who

has the currency? And so this is to mind actually the real

technical innovation for Bitcoin, it has done this using

some hashtrees and then a delay time, and then CPU

work has to be done in order to move one thing to

another so information can't spread too fast etc. OK, so,

once you have a system of currency that is easy to use

like that, then you can start to use it for things that you

want to be scarce. What is the example of some things

that we want to be scarce? Well, domain names. Names.

We want names to be scarce. We want short names to be

scarce, otherwise if they are not scarce, if it doesn't take

work to get them, as soon as you have a nice naming

system, some arsehole is going to come along and

register every short name themselves.

JA

Right. That's very interesting.ES

So this Bitcoin replacement for DNS is precisely what I

wanted and what I was theorizing about, which is not a

DNS system, but rather short names... short bit of text to

long bit of text tuple registering service. Cause that is the

abstraction of domain names and all these problems

solved. Yes, you have some something that you want to

register that is short, and you want to couple that to

something that is unmemorable and longer. So for

example, the first amendment, that phrase, the "US first

amendment", is a very short phrase, but it expands to a

longer bit of text. So you take the hash of this text, and

JA


26 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

now you have got something that is intrinsically coupled

to that which is unmemorable. But then you can register

"US First Amendment" coupled to the hash. And that

then means you have a structure where you can tell

whether something has been published or unpublished,

you can... one piece of human intellectual information

can cite another one in a way that... can't be manipulated,

and if it is censored the censorship can be found out. And

if one place is censored, well you can scour the entire

world for this hash, and no matter where you find you

know it is what you wanted precisely!

RightES

So that, in theory, then permits human beings to build up

an intellectual scaffold where every citation, every

reference to some other part of human intellectual

content, is precise, and can be discovered if it exists out

there anywhere at all, and is not dependent on any

particular organization. So as a way of publishing this

seems to be the most censorship resistant manner of

publishing possible, because it is not dependent on any

particular mechanism of publishing. You can be

publishing through the post, you can be publishing on

conventional websites, you can be publishing using

Bittorrent, whatever, but the naming is consistent. And

same is for... publishing is also a matter of transferring,

you can... all you then have to do is, if you want to

transfer something anonymously to someone else, one

particular person, you encrypt the information with their

key, and you publish it.

JA

Are you worried.. basically this entire system depends on

basically irrevocable key structures. Are you worried that

the key structures would fall apart?

ES

Well the hashing, in terms of the naming part, going to

patterns--it doesn't depend on the key structure at all. In

terms of Bitcoin has its own key structure and that's an

independent thing, there is all sorts of problems with it.

Hackers can come in and steal keys etc. And the same

JA


27 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

problems that you have with cash. Armored vans are

needed to protect the cash etc. And there are some

enhancements you can use to try and remove the

incentives one way or another. You can introduce a

subcurrency with fixed periods of expense. So you retract

for one week or one day and a merchant will accept or

not accept.

The average person does not understand that RSA was

broken into an awful lot of private keys involving

commerce were taken,

ES

YesJA

so...ES

The public key structure is a tremendous problem, so in

the same way that domain name structures are a

tremendous problem. The browser based public key

system that we have for authenticating what websites you

are going to, it is awful. It is truly awful. The number of

people that have been licensed to mint keys is so

tremendous.. there's one got bankrupted and got bought

up cheaply by Russian companies, you can assume, I

have been told actually that VeriSign, by people who are

in the know, although I am not yet willing to go on the

public record, cause I only have one source, just between

you and me, one source that says that VeriSign has

actually given keys to the US government. Not all, but a

particular key. That's a big problem with the way things

are authenticated presently. There are some traditional

alternative approaches, like PGP has a web of trust. I

don't think those things really work. What I think does

work is something close to what SSH does, and that's

probably the way forward. Which is it is opportunistic

key registration. So there is part of your interaction, the

first time you interact, you register your key, and then if

you have a few points of keying or some kind of flood

network, then you can see that well lots of people have

seen that key many times in the past.

JA


28 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

And one more technical question, and I think we should

probably, Scott you were sort of...ES

I'm ready! Ha ha ha.SM

When we were sort of chatting initially we talked about

my idea that powering, mobile phones being powered, is

sort of changing society. A rough summary of your

answer for everybody else is that people are very much

the same and something big has to change their

behaviour, and this might be one of them, and you said,

you were very interested in someone building phone to

phone encryption. Can you talk a little bit about, roughly,

the architecture where you would have a broad open

network and you have person to person encryption. What

does that mean technically, how would it work, why is it

important. That kind of stuff. I mean, I think people don't

understand any of this area in my view.

ES

When we were dealing with Egypt we saw the Mubarak

government cut off the internet and we saw only one -

there was one ISP that quite few of us were involved in

trying to keep its connections open, it had maybe 6% of

the market. Eventually they cut.. eventually the Mubarak

government also cut off the mobile phone system. And

why is it that that can be done? People with mobile

phones have a device that can communicate in a radio

spectrum. In a city there is a high density... there is

always, if you like, a path between one person and

another person. That is there is always a continuous path

of mobile phones, each one can in theory hear the radio

of the other.

JA

You could form a peer to peer network.ES

So in theory you could form a peer to peer network. Now

the way most GSM phones are being constructed and

others is that they receive on a different frequency to that

which they transmit...

JA


29 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

Yes.ES

...and that means that they cannot form peer to peer

networks. They have to go through base stations. But

we're seeing now that mobile phones are becoming more

flexible in terms of base station programming. And they

need to do this because they operate in different markets

that have different frequencies. They have different

forms of wireless output, and so ... and also, even if there

is not sufficiently flexible mobile phones, we are seeing

that in the mobile phone aspect, maybe WiMax is coming

along which will give them greater radius for two way

communications. But also it is getting very cheap to

make your own base station. There is software now

which will run a base station.

JA

Right, right.ES

For you. So you can throw these things up and make

your own networks with conventional mobile phones

pretty quickly. In fact this is what is done to spy, to keep

spying on mobile phones. You set up a fake base station.

And there's vans now, you can buy these in bulk on the

commercial spy market, to set up a van and intercept

mobile phone calls. During these revolutionary periods

the people involved in the revolution need to be able to

communicate. They need to be able to communicate in

order to plan quickly and also to communicate

information about what is happening in their

environment quickly so that they can dynamically adapt

to it and produce the next strategy. Where you only have

the security services being able to do this, and you turn

the mobile phone system off, the security services have

such an tremendous advantage compared to people that

are trying to oppose them. If you have a system where

individuals are able to communicate securely and

robustly despite what security services are doing, then

security services have to give more ground. It's not that

the government is necessarily going to be overthrown,

but rather they have to make more concessions.

JA


30 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

They have their networks. So your argument that even

with these existing phones they modify them to have peer

to peer encrypted tunnels for voice and data, presumably.

ES

Voice is a bit harder. What we did internally in this

prototype I designed was a -- which only works for

medium sized groups - so a peer to peer flood

UDP-encrypted network -- UDP permits you to put lots

and lots of cover traffic in cause you can send stuff to

random internet hosts.

JA

Oh, so, oh, so that's clever, so that way you can't be

blocked, right?ES

Yeah.JA

Because UDP is a single packet, right? So...ES

Right, so you send it to random internet hosts and a

random internet host doesn't respond, which is exactly

the same thing as a host that is receiving stuff. And even

structured... and using this you can do hole punching

through firewalls and it means that normal at home

people can use this. They don't need to have a server.

And it is very light bandwidth, so you can put it on

mobile phones as well. The killer application is not lots

of voice. Rather it is chat rooms. Small chatrooms of

thirty to a hundred people -- that is what revolution

movements need. They need it to be secure and they need

it to be robust. The system I did was protocol

independent. So yes, you've got your encapsulating thing,

UDP or whatever, and in theory you could be pushing it

over SMS you could be putting it over TCP, you could be

pushing it over whatever. You could be using a mobile

phone, you could be using a desktop or whatever. You

can put that into one big mesh, so that all you need, even

when the whole country is shut off you just need one

satellite connection out and your internal network

connects to the rest of the world.

JA


31 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

Yeah, yeah.ES

And if you've got a good routing system. If it is a small

network you can use flood, and thereby -- flood network

takes every possible path therefore it must take the fastest

possible path. Right? So a flood network always finds a

way but doesn't scale to large quantities. But if you've

got a good routing system you just need this one link out.

And in Cairo, we had people who hacked Toyota in

Cairo, and took over their satellite uplink, and used that

to connect to this ISP that fed 6% of the market, and so

that sort of thing was going on all this time. There was a

hacker war in Egypt to try and keep this -- I don't like to

call it radical, but this more independent ISP -- that

provided 6% of the market, up and going. But it shouldn't

have been so hard. It should have been the case that all

you need to do is have one connection and then the most

important information could get out. And if you look at,

if this is equivalent to SMSs, I mean look how important

Twitter is and how important SMS is. Actually, human

beings are pretty good at encoding the most important

thing that is happening into a short amount of data.

There's not that many human beings. There just aren't

that many. So with one pipe you can...

JA

It's not a bandwidth problem.ES

It's not a bandwidth problem. So all you need is one pipe.

And you can connect a country that is in a revolutionary

state to the rest of the world. And points within that

country just as important. Cities within that country. And

it's not that hard a thing to do quite frankly.

JA

Scott, do you wanna?ES

It's hard to stop! It's so interesting!SM

I actually, I have like five hours more...ES


32 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

I know! Because it's like one thing and then there's like

more and...SM

How would you architect this how would you architect

that... I think my summary would be that this notion of a

hash idea of the name is a very interesting one, because I

had not linked it to Bitcoin, or that kind of approach,

with scarcity. That's a new idea for me. Have you

published that idea?

ES

I've published... not the link to Bitcoin, that paper that

came out about coupling something to Bitcoin was just

trying to address the DNS issue. But fortunately the guy

who did it understood that... why just have quadtets? You

know, why limit it to IP addresses? It's sort of natural in a

way to make the thing so that it could go to any sort of

expansion. But the idea for... that there should be this

naming system and the importance of this naming

system, the importance of preserving history and doing

these scaffolds, and mapping out everything. Yeah, so

that's on the site, under... I think it is part of one of the

Hans Ulrich interview.

JA

I think we should study this quite a bit more so we

generally understand it... so we might have a few more

questions about it... The other comment I would make is

that on the assumption that what you are describing is

going to happen someday is probable given that the

incentive structure is...

ES

Well I've had these ideas several years but now I see

other people are also getting into...JA

Well there is enough people who are interested in solving

the problem you are trying to solve. On the internet you

see a lot of experiences. What I am thinking of is how

would I attack it. How would I attack your idea. And I

still think I would go after the signing and the key

infrastructure. So if I can break the keys...

ES

There are different parts of the idea. So, if you publishJA


33 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[chatter about food]

some information or if you spread some information...

this publishing thing is quite interesting as to whether

when something has gone from not being published to

being published its quite... interesting. So if you spread

some information and you've got it well labeled, using a

hash.

That hash is important. It is something that has to spread

in another way. So that is say by WikiLeaks signing the

hash. But there is many ways for it to spread. I mean

people could be swapping that hash in email. They could

be telling each other on the telephone etcetera.

JA

You are saying that all of these systems are do not have a

single point of attack, I can break down your HTTPS but

you can still use the US postal service to send it, for

example.

ES

Exactly, and you would know that you were getting the

right thing, because of its naming it is completely

accurate.

JA

I am just wondering, on the human side of this, you have

such experience of the world you described earlier. I

mean I had three hours sleep, so forgive me if I don't

remember exactly what you said, but some combination

of technical and altruistic people and what amounts to a

kind of subculture that you've been in for some 15 years

now.. So you know about how the subculture works. And

that subculture needs to either I guess stay the same or

expand in order to do the work that you are describing,

and so since our book is about ten years away...

JC

It's dramatically expanded...JA

What are the patterns there in terms of the people part,

rather than the...?JC


34 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

That's the most optimistic thing that is happening. The

radicalization of internet educated youth. People who are

receiving their values from the internet... and then as they

find them to be compatible echoing them back. The echo

back is now so strong that it drowns the original

statements. Completely. The people I've dealt with from

the 1960s radicals who helped liberate Greece and..

Salazar. They are saying that this moment in time is the

most similar to what happened in this period of liberation

movements in the 1960s, that they have seen.

JA

Do you see it scaling differently than it did in the 60s?JC

And as far as what has entered into the West, because

there are certain regions of the world I am not aware of,

but as far as I am aware that -- and of course I wasn't

alive in the 1960s -- but as far as I can tell, that statement

is true. This is the political education of apolitical

technical people. It is extraordinary, in the same way that

the young...

JA

A-political? Do you mean one word?LS

One word. People are going from... young people are

going from apolitical to political. It is a very very

interesting transition to see.

JA

How do you think... I mean this is your world why do

you think that took place? I mean, why do you think it

took place?

JC

Fast communication. Critical mass of young people.

Newer generation. And then some catalyzing events. The

attack on us was a catalyzing event. And our defense...

our success in defending was a catalyzing event. I don't

know, do you remember the PGP case, and that grand

jury with Zimmermann and so on?

JA

He had a lot of fun that with that.ES


35 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[LS spills water all over her note taking laptop]

[JA quickly grabs her laptop and turns it upside down]

[laughter]

[chatter]

I wrote half a book on that. It was never published,

because my cowriter went and had children.JA

Ha ha ha haLS

Ha ha ha!ES

Ha ha ha! Why do I feel that has happened before?JC

So much for the historical record!SM

As I said--multiple copies!JA

Why don't you save whatever you were doing... get it

into the name tree before... Someone: everything goes

wrong...

SM

Did you see how fast he was? It was like an impulse.LS

Yeah, I feel you were almost there before the computer...JC

Computers are important...SM


36 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[laughter]

[laughter]

[Laughter]

[laughter]

That was sweet, thank you. Go ahead.LS

So you were saying. But young people aren't inherently

good. And I say that as a father and with regret.SM

Oh no I think that actually... well, I've read the Lord of

the Flies...JA

and I went to thirty different schools, so I've seen plenty

of Lord of the Flies situations...JA

...But no, I think that the instincts human beings have are

actually much better than the societies that we have.JA

Then the governments, basically.JC

I am not going to say governments. The whole structure

of the society. The economic structure. And that people

learn that simple altruistic acts don't pay off and they see

that some people who act in non altruistic ways end up

getting Porsches and fast cars, and it tends to pull people

in that direction. I thought about this a while ago when I

saw there was this fantastic video that came out of

Stanford in about '69 on nuclear synthesis of DNA. Have

you seen it?

JA

No.SM


37 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

No.JC

No.ES

It's on youtube. It's great. A wonderful thing. So it is

explaining nuclear synthesis through interpretive dance.

And so there are like a hundred and thirty Stanford

students out there pretending to be DNA, a whole bunch

pretending to be a ribosomal subunit and da da da. And

all wearing the hippy clothes of the day. But they were

all actually very bright people. And I looked at that and

thought, could Stanford.. and it was a very good bit of

education, so it is not that it was cool and unusual, rather

that it was extremely instructive, and before computer

animation was the best representation of how a ribosomal

unit behaves. Could you see Stanford doing that now?

Absolutely impossible. It is far too conservative for it to

do that now, even though that was an extremely effective

education... you can bet everyone who was in that dance

remembers exactly how nuclear synthesis occurs,

because they all had to remember their parts. And I

remember it having seen it. No, rather that period of peak

earnings for the average wage in the United States was,

what, like '77? That certain things simply happened. That

those people who were altruistic and not too concerned

about finances and fiscalization simply lost power

relative to those people who were more concerned about

finances and fiscalization and worked their way up in the

system. So certain behaviours were disincentivized and

others were potentiated. And that is primarily I believe as

a result of technology that enables fiscalization. So fast

bank transfers. The IRS being able to account for lots of

people, it sucks people into a very rigid fiscalized

structure. So you can have a lot of political change in the

United States. But will it really change that much? Will it

change the amount of money in someone's bank account?

Will it change contracts? Will it void contracts that

already exist? And contracts on contracts, and contracts

on contracts on contracts? Not really. So I say that free

speech in many places - in many Western places - is free

JA


38 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

not as a result of liberal circumstances in the West but

rather as a result of such intense fiscalization that it

doesn't matter what you say. ie. the dominant elite doesn't

have to be scared of what people think, because a change

in political view is not going to change whether they own

their company or not. It is not going to change whether

they own a piece of land or not. But China is still a

political society. Although it is radically heading towards

a fiscalized society. And other societies, like Egypt was,

are still heavily politicized. And so their rulers really do

need to be concerned about what people think, and so

they spend a portion of efforts on controlling freedom of

speech.

So if you were...JC

But I think young people have fairly good values. Of

course it's a spectrum and so on. But they have fairly

good values most of the time. And they want to

demonstrate them to other people and you can see this

when people first go to university and so on. And they

become hardened as a result of certain things having a

pay off and other things not having a payoff. Studying

for an exam, constantly, even though in some cases the

work is completely mindless, and pointless, has a payoff

at the end of the year, but going and talking to someone

and doing a favour doesn't have a payoff at the end of the

year. And so this disincentivizes some behaviours and

incentivizes other ones.

JA

But let me tease out some of this, I mean it sounds like

you have got a view of the globe with certain societies

where the impact of technology is relatively slight,

certain societies where politically the impact of

technology can be quite great, and certain societies where

it would be at a sort of middling way. And you would put

China into I guess the middling category.

JC

Well, it's starting to...JA

Since our book is all about technology and socialJC


39 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

transformation ten years down the line... what's the globe

that you see given the structure that you are describing?

I am not sure about the impact on China. It is still a

political society, so the impact could be very great. I

mean I often say that censorship is always cause for

celebration. It is always an opportunity, because it

reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is

so weak that you have got to care about what people

think.

JA

Right. It's like you find the sensitive documents by

watching them hunt.JC

Exactly.JA

This is a very interesting argument.ES

Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.JC

So when the Chinese express all this energy on censoring

in all these novel ways, do we say that it is a complete

waste of time and energy, or do they have a whole bunch

of experience managing the country and understand that

it matters what people think? I say it is much more

reasonable to interpret it as the different groups different

actors within China who are able to control that

censorship system understand correctly that their power

position is weak and they need to be careful what people

think. So they have to censor.

JA

So the state is rational, at least in its repression.JC

I am always worried in talking about the state, because

it's all individuals acting in their own perceived interest.

Some, this group or that group.

JA

Fair enough.JC


40 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

Even the censors in China of the Public Security Bureau,

people who work there. Why do they censor stuff and

what do they censor first? I'll tell you what they censor

first? They censor first the thing that someone in the

Politburo might see. That's what they censor first. They

are not actually concerned about darknets.

JA

Sorry, about?JC

They are not concerned about darknets. Because their

bosses can't see what is on the darknet, and so they can't

be blamed for not censoring it. We had this fantastic case

here in the UK, we had a whole bunch of classified

documents from the UK military, and published a bunch.

And then later on we did a sort of preemptive FOI which

we do occasionally on various governments when we

can. So we did it on the UK ministry of defense, just to

see whether they were doing some investigation, sort of a

source protection to understand what is going on. So we

got back... first they pretended they were missing

documents and we appealed and we got back a bunch of

documents. And so it showed that someone in there had

spotted that there was a bunch of UK military documents

on our website. About their surveillance programme.

Another two thousand page document about how to stop

things leaking, and that the number one threat to the UK

ministry was investigative journalists. So that had gone

into some counterintelligence da da da da, and they had

like, oh my good, it has hundreds of thousands of pages,

and it is about all sorts of companies and it just keeps

going, and it's endless, it's endless! Exclamation marks,

you know, five exclamation marks. And that was like,

okay, that is the discovery phase, now the what is to be

done phase. What is to be done? BT has the contracts for

the MoD. They told BT to censor us from them. So

everyone in the UK MoD could no longer read what was

on WikiLeaks. Problem solved!

JA

Interesting.ES

It's like all the generals and their bosses and all theseJA


41 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

people could no longer see that we had MoD stuff on

there. And so now there is no more complaints and their

problem is solved. So understandings like this might be

quite advantageous to use in some of these systems. So it

means that darknets for example, if you understand the

bureaucratic structures that employ people and give them

tasks always have that sort of thing going on then that

means that darknets are gonna have a pretty easy time of

it, until they are so big that they are not darknets

anymore.

Hm. That's really... that's really really interesting. You

mentioned investigative journalism, do you... you've had

a lot of experience with journalism by now, in many

different respects, i mean, how do you see the kind of

freedom of information that you are describing, that you

were describing earlier, as fitting into journalistic

processes, if at all, or is it replacing it?

JC

No it is, I mean it's more how these journalistic processes

fit into something that is much bigger, and the much

bigger thing is that we as human beings shepherd and

create our intellectual history as a civilization. And it is

that intellectual history on the shelf that we can pull off

to do stuff, and not do the dumb thing again. Someone

already said said it was done and wrote about their

experience and we don't do it again. And so there are

several different processes that are creating that record

and other processes where people are trying to destroy

pieces of that record and others that are trying to prevent

people putting things into the record. We all live off that

intellectual record, so what we want to do is get as much

into the record, prevent as much as possible being

deleted from the record, and then, and then have the

record as searchable as possible.

JA

But one consequence of this view is that actors will find

the generation of very large amounts of misinformation

strategic for them.

ES

Yeah. So this is another type of censorship that I have

thought about but don't speak so much about. Which isJA


42 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

censorship through complexity.

Hide it. Too complicated.ES

And that is basically the offshore financial sector.

Censorship through complexity. Censorship of what?

Censorship of political outrage. With enough political

outrage there is law reform and enough law reform you

can't do it anymore. So why is it that all these careful tax

structuring arrangements are so complex? I mean, they

may be perfectly legal, but why are they so god damn

complex? Well, because the ones that weren't complex

were understood and the ones that were understood were

regulated, so you're only left with the things that are

incredibly complex.

JA

More noise less signal, kind of...ES

Yeah, exactly, exactly...JA

But how in the future will people deal with the fact that

the incentive to publish information that is misleading,

wrong, manipulative, is very high. Furthermore you can't

figure out who the bad publisher was as well as the

good...because there's anonymity in the system.

SM

Yeah, so I suggested. Well, the way it is right now is

there is very... first we must understand that the way it is

right now is very bad. Friend of mine Greg Mitchell

wrote a book about the mainstream media, So Wrong For

So Long. And that's basically it. That yes we have these

heroic moments with Watergate and Bernstein and so on,

but, come on, actually, it's never been very good it's

always been very bad. And these fine journalists are an

exception to the rule. And especially when you are

involved in something yourself and you know every facet

of it and you look to see what is reported by it in the

mainstream press, and you can see naked lies after naked

lies. You know that the journalist knows it's a lie, it is not

JA


43 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[Laughter]

a simple mistake, and then simple mistakes, and then

people repeating lies, and so on, that actually the

condition of the mainstream press nowadays is so

appalling I don't think it can be reformed. I don't think

that is possible. I think it has to be eliminated, and

replaced with something that is better.

Which does seem to be happening!JC

Yes, and I think things like, you know I have been

pushing this idea of scientific journalism that things must

be precisely cited the original source or as much of it as

possibly available should be put in the public domain so

that people can look at it, just like in science so that you

can test to see whether the conclusion comes from the

experimental data. Otherwise you probably just made it

up. You could have just made it up. And in fact that is

what happens all the time people just make it up. And

they make it up to such a degree that we are led to war. I

mean most... Most wars in the 20th century have started

as a result of lies. Amplified and spread by the

mainstream press. And you go, well that is a horrible

circumstance, that is terrible that all these wars start with

lies. And I say no, this is a tremendous opportunity,

because it means that populations basically don't like

wars and they have to be lied into it. And that means we

can be truthed into peace. And so that is the extremely

optimistic thing. But this, how do you distinguish

publishers, truthful publishers, untruthful publishers, this

is a reputation business. And so what I would like is that

part of that repetitional business, like in science, where is

your data? You're not providing your data, why the hell

should I take this seriously? Is that now that we can

publish on the internet, now that there is physically room

for the data, newspapers don't have physical room for the

primary source, now that there is physical room for the

primary source, it should be there and we should create a

standard that it should be there. And sure people can

JA


44 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

deviate from this standard, but well you deviate from the

standard, if you can't be bothered providing us with the

primary source data why should we pay any attention to

what you are writing? You're not treating the reader with

respect. It's not falsifiable therefore, therefore we can pay

no attention to it. But the issue of reputation, this is an

important issue. How do things have reputation? Well,

part of the way that they have reputation is by this

coupling of something happens, someone else says

something about it, someone else says something about

that, etc. And this is a series of citations as information

flows from one person to another and they augment it

and so on. For that to be strong you need this naming

system. Where what you are relying on is not some

startup website that just appears tomorrow, or some

company that didn't like it and has modified it or is being

sued out of existence. So that, I think, would help with

reputation. Complexity is harder. I think that is a big

problem. So when things become open things tend to

become more complex, because people start hiding what

they are doing, their bad behaviour, through complexity.

And so that will be bureaucratic double speak is an

example. When things get bureaucratized and so on, and

everything becomes mealy mouthed, and so that's a cost

of openness. Is that kind of bureaucratization, and in the

offshore sector you see incredible complexity in the

layers of things happening to one another so they become

impenetrable. And of course cryptography is an

intellectual system that has specialized in making things

as complex as possible. Those things are hard to attack.

On the other hand complex systems are also hard to use.

So bureaucracies and internal communications systems

which have this, which are full of weasel words and arse

covering, are inefficient internal communications

systems. And similarly, those tremendously complex

offshore structuring arrangements are actually inefficient.

But maybe you're ahead when the tax regime is high, but

if the tax regime is zero you're not going to be ahead at

all. Sorry, if the tax regime is 3%, you're not going to be

ahead at all, you're going to be choked by the complexity.

Well, if they weren't inefficient then everybody wouldJC


45 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

have their money offshore Julian.

Yeah, that's right.JA

I mean that as a joke, but it's probably true, heh.JC

No, that's true.JA

Let me just add that uh...JC

There is a battle between all of these things going on.

With different people, economic different... see I don't

see a different between government and big corporations

and small corporations, actually this is all one

continuum, these are all systems that are trying to get as

much power as possible. So that's what they are. A

general is trying to get as much power for his section of

the army, and so on. They advertise, they produce

something that they claim is a product, people buy it,

people don't buy it, they complexify in order to hide the

flaws in their product and they spin, so I don't see a big

difference between government and non government

actors in that way. There is one difference about the

deployment of coercive force but even there we see that

well connected corporations are able to tap into the

governmental system and the court system and are able

to deploy... effectively deploy coercive force, by sending

police to do debt requisition or kicking employees out of

the office.

JA

Can I just ask you about the same thing but sort of in

reverse which is the ways in which the sources of

information as individuals can and can't be protected, in

other words how can their information be anonymous, so

that they don't pay a price for circulating it. and you

know maybe with one example from North Korea or Iran

for example from the US, and the differences between

those scenarios.

JC


46 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

There is many ways for people to transmit anonymously.

One of the greatest difficulties for sources is their

proximity to the material. So if they have high proximity

to it and it's a limited number of people know it. It

actually doesn't matter what technical mechanism you

then apply at the top. It would be quite difficult for them

to evade scrutiny. And it doesn't matter what country or

regime you are in. But systematic injustice by definition

is going to have to involve many people. And so while

the inner sanctum of cabinet, maybe you cannot safely

get records out of this, but as those decisions start

spreading down to lower levels if they are to affect many

people many people must have either the high level

planning that produces some unjust consequence or the

shadow of it. So maybe the whole plan isn't visible by the

time it gets down to the grunts but some component of it

is visible. And this struck me when we got hold of the

two main manuals for Guantanamo Bay. The 2003

manual was the first one we got hold of, written by

Major... by General Jeffrey Miller, who subsequently

went over to Abu Ghraib, to GTMO-ize it, as Donald

Rumsfeld called it, so that manual had all sorts of abuses

in it and one of the ones that I was surprised to see was

explicit instructions to falsify records for the Red Cross.

And how many people have read this manual? Well all

the prison captains at Guantanamo Bay had read this.

Why would you risk telling the grunts this sort of

information? It wasn't even classified. They made it

unclassified -- For Official Use Only -- why? Because it's

more expensive to get people who have classification

clearance. If you want to hire contractors without

classification clearance it is cheaper. You can't whisper to

the coal face. You can't have the president whispering to

the coal face. Because the coal face, because the coal

face is too big. You can't have the president whispering

to the intermediaries, because then you end up with

Chinese whispers - that means your instructions are not

carried out. So if you take information off the paper, if

you take it outside of the electronic or physical paper

trail, the instructions decay. And that's why all

organizations of any scale have rigorous paper trails for

the instructions from the leadership. But by definition if

JA


47 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

you try... if you want people to do something, you are

going to have to have those form of instructions. Which

means there is always going to be a paper trail, except for

small group decisions. Small group decisions that don't

end up going to the coal face. And instructing hundreds

of people... are they so important in the scheme of

things?

We went to Berlin, there is a place where they signed the

final order, what's it called?ES

Final solution. Wannsee.LS

Wannsee, and these are Germans. So they documented

everything.ES

Fascinating.LS

So it's exactly your point, so that in order to kill six

million Jews, you actually have to write it down.ES

It's a big logistical process.JA

Absolutely, and many many many people had to be

implicated, what the procedures were and so on. And

here are the pictures of people and their signatures and so

forth.

JC

Minutes of the meeting...LS

It was like, seriously [inaudible]. This is the banality of

evil.ES

Indeed.LS

Yes, but this is one of the first things... internal

arguments I had with other people in 2006. While okay,

you have a good get, you expose some organization and

JA


48 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

show it has been abusing something in some way, and it

just takes something off paper. Well next thing it does,

well they just take it, and everything will go to oral form

and so on. No, that's not going to happen, because, if it

does go that way, fine, they take everything off paper, if

they internally balkanize, so that information can't be

leaked, what is the cost? There is a tremendous cost to

the organizational efficiency, of doing that. So that means

this abusive organization simply becomes less powerful

in its struggle for economic equilibrium and political

equilibrium with all other organizations.

This is the inverse of your argument about empowering

the dissidents in Egypt. They needed SMS to

communicate. In your argument, by stopping the inability

to coordinate at this level, the inverse of your argument.

Literally the inverse of the first...

ES

Yeah, so ...JA

Well, your argument would be if you take those tools

away...ES

Yeah, well, I say they take them away themselves in a

way. Once things can become public. So why is it that

people engage... why is it that powerful organizations -

there is all sorts of reasons why non-powerful

organizations engage in secrecy, which to my view is

legitimate, they need it, because they are powerless. But

why do powerful organizations engage in secrecy? Well,

usually because the plans that they have if made public

would be opposed by the public. And plans that are

opposed before implementation often don't get

implemented. So you want to wait as long as possible.

And then implementation eventually makes them public

by the very fact that they are being implemented but it is

too late by then to alter the course effectively. So an

organization on the other hand that is engaged in

planning behaviour that if revealed is not opposed by the

public doesn't have that burden. It doesn't have that

planning burden where it is forced to take things off

JA


49 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

paper. So this will be an efficient organization, this will

not be an efficient organization, and in the mix as they do

economic and political battle, it will equilibriate out,

these guys will shrink and these guys will grow.

Is that your fundamental justification, do you think... for

this, for the work that you're in?ES

Fundamental justification is that, there is really two. First

of all, the human civilization, its good part, is based upon

our full intellectual record, and our intellectual record

should be as large as possible if humanity is to be as

advanced as possible. The second is that in practice

releasing information is positive to those engaged in acts

that the public support and negative to those engaged in

acts that the public does not support.

JA

[inaudible]ES

YeahJA

...[inaudible] general restraint.ES

Well, it can create a redress for an act of injustice that is

revealed and that's nice. But the larger effect is that it

creates disincentives for organizations that are to create

unjust plans or engage in unjust acts.

JA

One more... In 10 years, what does this world look like?

In other words if you extrapolate this argument...ES

Well, we are at a bit of a crossroads, no? It could go

either way.JA

An optimistic scenario. What is the best scenario? Ha ha

ha.JC

So remember Philip Zimmermann's PGP case?JA


50 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

YesES

That was just a grand jury investigation. It was

moderately serious. But he wasn't convicted. No one at

that time was being convicted, they were being

investigated. It changed the behaviour of tens of

thousands of people who were involved in choosing to

put cryptography into programs or not. All sorts of

tortured copyright assignments and inter software

company structuring arrangements, and how code was

deployed, were engaged in, just from that negative signal

of a grand jury investigation. So what that means is that

signals about what behaviour is acceptable, what

behaviour you can get away with and what behaviour is

beneficial to individuals engaging in it and what

behaviour is not, changes how many people behave. So

we are at a crossroads now where those organizations

that are fighting against those people who want to be able

to publish freely and disclose important information to

the public... I can't remember the beginning of this

sentence now.

JA

You said we are at a crossroads now where those

organizations that are fighting against those people who

want to be able to publish freely and disclose important

information to the public.

JC

It was pretty long wasn't it? Okay, hah. ...Could produce

if successful a signal which discourages everyone or

almost everyone from engaging in those activities, or we

and people who share our values could be successful and

that will then become the new norm of accepted

behaviour.

JA

And what are the necessary conditions for that to occur

for the latter? I can easily imagine the necessary

conditions for the former.

ES

Everyone gives money to WikiLeaks. That is the main...JA


51 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[laughter]

[laughter]

[laughter]

I didn't even hear that!JC

Everyone gives money to WikiLeaks.ES

Ha ha ha.LS

Are you taking Bitcoin?JC

Yes. Yes. Um. So it is quite interesting to know whether,

if people read this and then act will they actually be

enough to change the result. That is why we are at a very

interesting period and I think we are literally at this

crossroads and a little bit more push to one direction or

another could change the outcome a lot. So people

should, if they want to see the values that we promote

succeed, promote those organizations and individuals

that represent those values and start taking on doing it

themselves.

JA

I was going to say, or become it.JC

Yeah, become it. Become representations of those values

themselves. I am always hesitant in saying that everyone

should go out and be a martyr. Because i don't believe

that. I believe the most effective activists are those that

fight and run away. Not those who fight and martyr

themselves, but those who fight and run away to fight

another day. So that's about judgement, when to engage

JA


52 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[laughter]

in the fight and when to withdraw so as to preserve your

resources for the next fight.

Would you make the argument that fighting and running

away is not that not different, like physically fighting and

running away is not that different from fighting

anonymously so long as you are sufficiently competent

that your anonymity...

JC

If you have perfect anonymity you can fight forever,

yeah. You don't have to run away.JA

Pre-run away.SM

That's it in essence. Pre-run away.JC

Well, you can lower the courage threshold, I mean that is

one of the nice things anonymity does. But maybe it is

not the right way to put it. I mean, people often say, you

are tremendously courageous in doing what you are

doing, and I say, no no you misunderstand what courage

is. Courage is not the absence of fear. Only fools have no

fear. Rather courage is the intellectual mastery of fear by

understanding the true risks and opportunities of the

situation. And in keeping these things in balance. And

not simply having prejudice about what the risks are. But

actually testing them. There are all sorts of myths that go

around about what can be done and what cannot be done.

It is important to test. You don't test by jumping off a

bridge. You test by jumping off a footstool, and then

jumping off something a bit higher and a bit higher.

JA

Actually, to follow up to that, it goes back to what Scott

was asking about the relationship between the person

providing information and the person receiving it. If we

look at all the different societies around the world,

presumably not everyone is starting on the same level

JC


53 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[chuckles]

playing field. There are some people who just have a

greater education of the risks associated with using these

tools. There are some people who are going to provide

information in societies where the governments aren't as

vigilant, and some where they are very vigilant. It would

seem that in a place, now don't get me wrong, like North

Korea, where the combination of very vigilant regimes,

with populations that are still relatively new to these

tools and the risks associated with them may not be able

to have that understanding of the true risks of the

situation, and the opportunities that might be available

that you are mentioning.

I think they are capable of learning. Like everyone else.

These societies are much more political than the West.

People like to talk about politics over dinner every night.

So I am not sure it is right to take a Western perspective

and think that these people don't understand the lot that

they are in. Also, the extrinsic risks might be higher. The

other risks associated with conducting a political life may

already be quite high. So one has to keep these risks in

proportion. Also the potential rewards are much greater.

One might be involved in a very grand historic moment,

and become swept up in it. And because we all only live

once, we all suffer the continuous risk of not having lived

our life well. Every year. Every year that is not used is

100% wasted, it's not a risk of that, it is a dead bet.

JA

Here's an aside for you. A few weeks ago I was with

Warren Buffett... who's 78. And I said What are you up

to? And he said 'This next year will be the best year of

my life. And I thought ok...

ES

I need to go the rest room. Upstairs?SM

So I thought ok. He's obviously playing with me, and

then I figured it out that if you're 76, then the next year is

going to be the best year of the rest of your life. Because

ES


54 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[laughter]

[chatter]

[laughter]

at some point there is going to be a year where it's not

going to be so good. And then you are going to be dead.

And so, I love that, right. This next is going to be the best

year.

Julian how do you feel about photographs for the book?

Do you mind if I take snapshots of you guys just

working? How do you? You can see them? Up to you. I

would just take shots this way, and then that way.

LS

Of who doing what, exactly?JA

Of you guys talking. Just conversation.LS

Oh that's alright.JA

Using my S95 cameraES

[inaudible] Yes. Exactly, it's a very high tech operation

going on hereLS

Just don't say anything antisemitic for the next few

months.JA

We would never say anything anti-semitic.ES

No no, it's just the last the last this Russian journalist

came over and took a photo of me and then he is a, he isJA


55 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[chatter, laughing]

a sort of, his name is Israel Shamir, he is as Jewish as

could possibly be, but he is very, he converted to Russian

Orthodox, and is anti-Judaistic, and so he then put this

out in Russian Reporter or something with this photo of

me, and I started to cop it, in the most unbelievable way.

Interesting.

You and I both understand the costs of negative publicity.

ES

It's just a joke, but, you know. I know you have been well

tested.JA

I am very well tested, I am very well behaved.ES

One of the more, the criticism that is constant, is that

damage has occurred because of WikiLeaks. I can't find

it yet. Do you have a reasoned...

ES

Well there is, it's a rhetorical trick. So...JA

You understand the question and why I ask it?ES

Yeah yeah.JA

I understand the case it gets... your version... Which

obviously we are sympathetic to, so...ES

Up until Collateral Murder we were a cause celebre in

the United States, actually we are still a cause celebre,

but it is in a smaller libertarian or left wing or libertarian

right wing community now. But, and across, according to

Reuters across 24 countries we have over three quarters

support of the general population. 24 countries. It's the

worst in the United States. So we have support of over

40% of the population, which is pretty good actually,

JA


56 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

considering what has been happening. So, as a result of

embarrassing the US military and diplomatic class we

have had a counterattack. And that counterattack is

significant. This is a very significant power group. And it

is a power group that is not just at the top of the White

House. It is not just a few generals. Rather it is all the

people connected to and profiting from that system. And

that's about a third of the US population. So all the way

from Chelsea Clinton down to the someone in the gutters

of San Antonio whose brother is deployed in Iraq. There

are 900,000 people in the US with Top Secret security

clearances at this moment. There are 2 and a half million

that have classified security clearances. If we go back

over the past 20 years and ask how many people had

security clearances, maybe it is 15 million. If you then go

and look at all their spouses and business partners and

children we are looking at something like 30% of the

population of the United States. It is one degree removed

from that way of living and that ideological structure and

that patronage system. So it is quite different in the

United States to say something that is against that

system. And the New York Times has found to its peril

when it tries to speak out against it, so in its relationships

with us when it published material had to react very

defensively. In a way to someone outside the United...

no, I think that even traditional US journalists think this.

It is sickening to see a newspaper of any strength saying

literally how pleased those words the White House was

with its behaviour. So if we look at the attacks on us,

they always talk about the words "placed people at risk."

But risk relative to what? Right now we are at risk of a

meteorite passing through the roof of this house and

killing us all. That is a risk that is true. But is it a

proportionate risk? Is it a risk that is significant enough

that it is even worth speaking about? Well, the answer is

no. Similarly with the word possibility. There is a

possibility that a meterorite could descend on us all in

this moment, but it is not a probability. So these

rhetorical tricks are often used by people who are making

their argument in relation to security. There is a risk of

something there is a possibility of something. What has

to be done is people need to engage in an intellectual


57 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

defense against manipulation by rhetoric by

understanding that if someone mentions that there is a

risk without saying the risk is higher than crossing the

road, or the risk is twice that of being stung by a bee,

then you must ignore it. Similarly with possibility versus

probability.

Yeah, I can do all this in my head too. Are there

examples where a positive outcome could be directly

traced to WikiLeaks in the political sphere that you

would want to highlight? Something that is a specific

tangible positive outcome?

JC

The most significant one seems to be the Arab Spring.JA

You would argue that WikiLeaks was out there...JC

Well Amnesty International did in its latest report and

Tunisian professors did, because my direct involvement

it would be unseemly for me to argue that directly, and I

am not certain about directly. I am certain that we

affected it. And we were deeply involved in it.

JA

Influenced it.ES

I am certain that we influenced it. And that's... that is

really something, a great moment. Something I am

certain about is that we changed the outcome of the

Kenyan election in 2007. There has been many ministers

whose scalps were taken and people being forced to

resign and so on. Those are concrete and clear actions

and one might argue that they are positive if you didn't

like the guy, and you would argue that they were

negative if you did like the guy, so I don't really want to

mention those ones.

JA

Yes, if I go back to your earlier argument that the effect

on a single individual is not your actual goal. The actual

effect is to change the system in some fundamental way.

Because you make the argument that these systems

ES


58 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

become fiscalized, you know, they are static, independent

of any pressure, so an example of a truly large influence

would be a revolution. Right?

Yeah, well it is something that... you can make many of

these sort of large influences without these dichotomatic

events. But the dichotomatic events are easy to - binary

events - are very easy to talk about and also are provable.

JA

It's also a marketing prop. You want to have a marketing

story.ES

Yeah, so one party or another party wins the election and

it changed. That is a very clear outcome. There is a

revolution. One group is in power, and then another

group is in power, it is a very clear change. I suspect that

the other changes we have had such as liberalization of

the publishing environment I suspect is the most

significant one that we have been involved in, and

something we have pushed for many years. There is no

way that what we did last year we could have done four

years ago. It would not have been possible.

JA

How come? Technologically? or in terms of?ES

Technologically it was all perfectly possible. The

difference is a shift in the status quo. WikiLeaks became

the status quo. So that wasn't always so. During the first

two years we were battling for whether we were

something that was acceptable to be on the internet or

not. After two years, and specially after the Bank Julius

Baer case, where we were involved in a big legal case in

San Francisco... on the one hand us, and on the other

hand the largest private Swiss banking concern bank

Julius Baer, that was trying to shut us down. Which we

conclusively won. And cost them their US IPO as a

result. That sort of sent out a signal that there is a place

in the world for a publisher like WikiLeaks. And then we

started to cement that place as time went by. And now we

have really cemented it because we had a case where the

Pentagon stood up in public, back in October 2010 and

JA


59 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[sniggering]

gave a 40 minute press conference with their

spokesperson Geoff Morrell, saying that WikiLeaks must

- and me personally - must destroy everything we

previously published that had been derived from the

Pentagon. That we must destroy everything we were

going to publish. And cease dealing with US military

whistleblowers. The precise terminology used was to

return everything that we had ever published, return

everything that we were going to publish, and cease

soliciting information of US military personnel, or US

government personnel. Or, the Pentagon would "compel"

us to do so. And when asked by a journalist at the press

conference what mechanisms do you have to compel

them, the response was, well, look this is the Pentagon,

we are not concerned about the law.

That's perhaps a matter for the Department of Justice, or

the attorney general or something.JA

When you watched that, did you get the impression that

they were just an unbelievable amount of naivete or lack

of understanding about the actual technology or technical

aspects of this that would make that impossible.

JC

I did, but then later on I developed a sophisticated

understanding of what was going on in that press

conference.

JA

I actually started out very unsophisticated. Ha ha ha.JC

So what was actually going on. This was a carefully... I

mean, it seems ridiculous. Why would the Pentagon act

like a victim? Why would they look so ridiculous and

powerless? Why would they utter... give a demand that

they were not capable of fulfilling, it would make them

look weak? It was a carefully constructed legal message,

designed to embroil us in the US Espionage Act. It was

the notification, like you see in the newspapers.

JA


60 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[chatter]

[chatter, moving]

Yeah.ES

We demand that you do this. This is the type of

information that will cause grave harm to US national

security. We make a press conference so that we can

argue that all those WikiLeaks people have seen it. Then

the next thing they publish they will demonstrate intent.

So despite the fact that they have been informed that this

is amiss, they did it anyway, therefore they have intent,

because you can't accidentally commit espionage.

JA

That's why they are concerned with the past and not just

the present. Because there has to be a pattern of practice

and and as long as its instances of fresh instance then

there is no pattern.

SM

Yeah, but in saying, no, we did quickly, actually, before

we had understood what the legal trap was. But in saying

no and then in relatively short order producing the Iraqi

War Diaries, which is one of the best things we've ever

done...

JA

Okay. We can go into the other room.JA

...increasingly using WikiLeaks information as a source

and done sometimes done without even mentioning that

it was a source sometimes... it's a sociology of

information which is fascinating.

JC

Well, in the beginning they wouldn't, now they do. It

gives them more prestige now to say that it came from us

than to...

JA


61 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[chatter]

I know, I know, I know. It is, it is.JC

I'll just show you something funny. I'll just show you

something... Do you like our... slogan?JA

Keep calm and carry.. ha ha ha. The second world war!

Ha ha ha.ES

That's looks like an original one though...JC

We were admiring the pictures of all the... of all the...SM

So these are Vaughan's ancestors. That's Vaughan there,

my friend. That's from Afghanistan earlier this year.JA

He's some sort of reporter type, right?SM

A war reporter.JA

I'm sorry, who is this?JC

This is the owner of the house, my friend, Vaughan

Smith.JA

Oh, right, right. I've been to his club!JC

Yeah, so he's a war reporter. Although he was in the

Grenadier Guards originally, and then he, I think he

understood, you could go to the other side. He went to

the other side, but also, you could go to more wars as a

war reporter, than as a...

JA

Ha ha ha. And different ones. It's better that way. This isJC


62 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[laughter]

his family?

These are all family. That's his father and mother. And

they both live here. In a house, on the edge of the village.JA

So it's a military family from a little ways...JC

The other interesting guy is that guy right there, Tiger

Smith, there's rakish looking one with the collar up, who

is famous for killing 99 tigers back when that sort of

thing was approved of. Saving Indians.

JA

So he was a raj figure of some kind?JC

Yeah, but, so here is the comedy. This medal--Vaughan's

father was the Queen's messenger, so that means he

would go on aeroplanes and deliver messages. Now, see

this bag in his hand there. So you know what's in this

bag.

JA

State secrets.JC

Diplomatic cables!JA

Ha ha ha ha ha ha!ES

That's great.ES

So he would go on the Concorde, and have a seat to the

left and and a seat to the right which was filled with

cable bags and deliveries, sometimes they would take

computers as well, people come into the bay of the

airplane and guide it in and make sure it's not stolen. And

JA


63 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

another guy is waiting at the other end to take it.

And what does he say about it?LS

Well he's sort of, horrified on the one hand and deeply

pleased on the other, because if they'd just used him none

of this would have happened!

JA

Ha ha ha ha ha!JC

And before we ask, let me just ask you've been here for

about 6 months?ES

Eight months.JA

Eight months. So this is your home.SM

Well, it's a lovely place.JC

We got these this morning, because I have to go to the

police station every day, unfortunately I get crazed fans

turning up there.

JA

Oh really? They then do things? [indistinct]JC

This was a French girl who drove up from France.JA

Really?LS

I've had girls who drive from France, Catalonia, Norway,

she didn't drive from Norway, she flew from Norway,

Amsterdam, we had a guy from the US sold his boat and

came over here. Captain Morgan.

JA


64 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[laughter]

How far is it to the police station?ES

About 15 minutes. 20 minutes.JA

The woman from Catalonia was the most amusing, so

she turned up at the Frontline Club and tried to convince

them that she was WikiLeaks staff, Wikileaks star

Spanish programmer.

JA

Ha ha ha ha ha ha!ES

And she didn't know anything about programming, she

just gave some technobabble, and they assumed it was

true. And then after a while they were like uh, well you

can't really go and see Julian, he's in seclusion, but ok,

so, they put her up for free for one night. And she had

this habit of listening in on a bit of conversation and then

sort of reincorporating it into her story. And the next day:

Oh I know this person, oh look there's so and so!

JA

Ha ha ha haES

So within two days this had all come undone and she had

been sent along. And then two weeks later there is a

phone call saying oh! Sorry, two weeks later I am here,

and the police come to the door, and they are saying, do

you know... [XXXX]? [XXXX]? [XXXX] who?--Your

fiancee!

JA

No! no!--Well she stayed at this property all night! And

she says that you are going to pay the taxi bill!JA

[gasps]LS

And I'm like what taxi bill? So it turns out that she hadJA


65 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[laughter]

[laughter]

come from Catalonia, to London, got a black cab from

London to here, five hundred pounds, she had fifty

pounds, convinced the taxi driver that her rich famous

fiancee would pay for it, it's just a bit of a dispute at the

moment but it will all sort out in the morning. Then she

had gone to the edge of the property, and convinced them

that she was my fiancee. And the taxi driver wouldn't go

because he wanted his money. The people at the edge of

the property put them both up for the night.

At what point do you just pay her for the creativity... for

the entertainment... I mean it's so creative, it's almost

impressive.

JC

Then she was eventually arrested for fare evasion.

Because no one would pay the bill. Failed to appear on

February 14, Valentine's Day...

JA

...with bail conditions that she couldn't appear in Norfolk,

so she flew back to Catalonia, so then we see on her

Facebook page that she is still going on about how in

love she is, and there is these terrible women that live

here..

JA

The harpies!JC

prevented her - the harpies - prevented her from coming

in contact with me.JA

Proving that everything on the internet is absolutely true.

Every single fact.SM

Especially Facebook!JC


66 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[walking on stones]

Especially Facebook.SM

Wow. Interesting.LS

Would you like...ES

No I'm good. I'm good actually.JC

I want to be sensitive to your energy and time. I think, it

would be interesting to talk a bit about...ES

Maybe we should go for a walk, then.JA

It would be interesting to talk about the various what-if

scenarios. That's what we're interested in, because Jared

and I do this all the time. You know what are some

scenarios that could play out. You know, try to actually

think about it. You've all these different actors and

players, and you obviously think about it, you're

basically a physicist, right. You think about it that way.

So...

ES

In thinking about what if scenarios. It can actually be

useful to think, what if, in the past. Like what if we're

sitting there, one of our chapters looks at intervention, in

the context of the Rwandan genocide, but I think it is

actually a more useful conversation from understanding

the role of WikiLeaks to ask, you know, in 1994, at the

technological stage of the world today, technological

state of the world now had been the technological state of

the world then, and WikiLeaks was around during the

Rwandan genocide what might have changed? How

might things have been different?

JC


67 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

Just wondering if the weather will change.JA

Yeah, British weather. Ha ha.JC

The Rwandan genocide. Yes, I think it would have been.

I think it would have been a bit different. If they had

internet and a number of phones in Rwanda, I think the

message would have come out more, although maybe not

that much. I mean, in the Congo, all the bad things

happening in Congo aren't really getting much traction in

the West.

JA

This is a fantastic tree. It keeps us totally dry.SM

I guess, I mean that sort of there is a larger 'what if'

questions here. It is part what if, and part why. Like why

haven't there been people in places like Iran or North

Korea or Congo, releasing documents in the same way as

there have been in say in Western democracies.

JC

Well, we have actually, we have gotten a material from

Iran. I think, it's not that easy to do a WikiLeaks, in

combination of technicalities and reputation and funding

and so on. It's not that easy to do. And we... so that's

keeping a reputation.

JA

Okay, let us just ask the question bluntly. Why are you

not getting enormous numbers of anonymous USB drives

about the bad documents in African countries that are run

by these evil dictator types?

ES

We have, we actually...JA

Don't you think that everyone would be incentivized to

use you? Shouldn't they?ES

We have gotten some decent African stuff. Decent East

Timorese stuff. Lots of decent Latin American stuff.JA


68 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

Is it because these governments don't write down as

much of this stuff?ES

They are not as networked. Some of them, like the

Tanzanian government use kisswahili,they don't use

English as their governmental language. A lot of it is to

do just whether they perceive whether WikiLeaks is a

political actor within their country. So for East Timor

once we started doing a little bit of East Timor, we got a

lot more of East Timor. And then a sort of flood opened

up. And it just became routine for them to give us

material. But they need to perceive that we are part of the

community. For Russia I think our... the small amount of

material that we have released about Russia, although

now we have this RUleaks, that has been doing pretty

well, but historically a small amount of material that we

have been releasing from Russia is actually a positive

sign, in that the Russian internet sphere is very vibrant.

JA

Yeah I was just there, it's amazing.ES

So it feels that... you know, it doesn't look outside so

much. Why would it look at an English language website

like WikiLeaks. It has its sort of non-profit activist

journalists and opposition and so on are all in that

internet sphere, which is relatively free, compared to

Russian TV, so they don't see that they really need this

other avenue.

JA

It just seems like...JC

There was a site that... there was a publication of a whole

load of FSB documents, on an American server, which

was then immediately hacked and then taken down, and

they were never seen again. It is not so easy to publish

against powerful state actors, actually.

JA

You've talked a lot about the importance of the name, it's

been sort of I think an important theme in this

conversation and so it makes me wonder how much the

JC


69 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

kind of... there's the debut, when the site goes live, then

there's the major debut where it becomes a household

term or a household name, and one of the things that we

are playing around with in the book...

We haven't properly used that yet though... I mean, we

haven't been able to grow as fast as the name has been

able to grow.

JA

People know what WikiLeaks is, and I wonder had the

first batch of documents that you received been from a

say Iran or from a North Korea and released if we would

have, if the world would have looked at it as a

whistleblowing platform...

JC

It did! The world did! Did up until we started producing

a high volume of US military stuff. We were producing

maybe thousands of pages of US military stuff back in

2007...

JA

And nobody noticed.ES

That's interesting.JC

Because of the collateral damage video...ES

Well nobody... people noticed the Guantanamo stuff, but

not to the household name. We were a journalistic name

pretty quickly. And in the techno part of the human rights

community we were a name pretty quickly. And we were

in the internet educated German and English speaking

publics, especially towards the crypto-security end we

were a name pretty quickly. So for example when we did

a fundraising effort in the beginning of 2010 to May

2010, before Collateral Murder, we raised a million

bucks. So you know for a new sort of, new in terms of

concept, non profit journalism group to raise a million

bucks in 20 dollar donations -- that's almost completely

unheard of And we were doing that before Collateral

Murder. So Collateral Murder made us into a

JA


70 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

worldwide... no not even collateral murder didy. Made us

into a US household name. All these things start to stack

up. By the end of the year, and really it was the

Pentagon's attack against us, and the Swedish sex case

funnily enough, that then made us into a worldwide

household name with 84% name recognition worldwide.

Wow.JC

That's interesting. So, on the assumption that the current

legal stuff is all resolved, the next few years are... what

happens with WikiLeaks, it becomes... Again, we want to

talk about for us t=0 is a year from now, so we're

thinking about a year from now, next year the next year.

Does WikiLeaks just become bigger, more donors, more

technology, you going to change it in some way?

ES

There is lots of changes. I think this idea I had about how

to structure intellectual information is important. So we

will overlay that...

JA

So that's... that's actually a part of your plan, that you're

talking about.ES

When you do have a presence... When you have such

public recognition, you have the luxury of being able to

take fairly complex intellectual ideas and push them up.

That would normally take a long time to sort of

organically get traction, like Sun did with Java, for

example, they take a long time to organically get traction,

but you can put your weight behind them and push them

up so we have some of those moves we can make. But

also I've seen that it's very difficult for us to be a

command and control organization. You spoke about the

difficulties that you had to learn with Novell, but for us

as an organization, like a command and control

organization with a leadership and people who carry out

tasks, we are in a position where we have the full force of

a superpower and its investigative organs, and the rest of

NATO, operating against us, bribing people, monitoring

communications, etc, so that means that for us any little

JA


71 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

psychological weakness in our people, any friction

between our people, can lead to those forces plucking

them off.

You could be infiltrated you mean. In theory.ES

Yeah. Infiltrated. The plucking off I think is a bigger

problem.JA

No I mean... But the forces opposed to you...ES

But you are right about the infiltration...JA

But the forces opposed to you, they will think, okay, this

is a foreign actor, let's send our agent in, become a

member, discover all their secrets.

ES

Right, and we are aware of that problem and we

investigate people, and so on. But what that means is that

it has tremendously slowed down our growth. Because

you can't just put an ad out and say we want you to have

these skills and come into the office, it is absolutely

impossible. So growth is constrained in that way. But

there is another way of leading, and that is leading

through values instead of command and control. And

when you lead through values you don't need to trust

people, and values and the number of people who can

adopt the value, there is no limit on the speed of

adoption. It all happens very quickly. It's not, supply, in

terms of employer supply limited, rather it's demand

limited, as soon as people demand a value they adopt it.

JA

I see that, the way I express that, is that the power of an

idea is under-appreciated. That you can get the idea

inserted correctly then millions of people... My comment

would be that the deeper ideas that you are talking about

they are either not understood or they are being fought by

misinformation. You know as you said it's a clever use of

words, turned against you, what have you. So you have I

think a challenge to get the deeper arguments that you

ES


72 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[laughter]

have made to us, heard over all these other forces.

Saying it... well, if you say lies for long enough people

start to believe it as well, but so this, the "Afghan release

was a terrible thing." This has now spread so fast that we

are basically given up trying to knock it down. The

energy is better off spent doing something else. But we

do see that we are educating a whole range of people

about us and about our values and about things that we

believe in. And now what is happening is that these

people are finding each other across the world and across

states. And we are creating our own computational

network of human beings that can think in the same way,

that on a point to point basis can trust each other. We

started out last year in a position where we had this big

confrontation with the State Department, and the

Pentagon at the same time. One of our few claims to

success is that we've managed to get the Pentagon and

the State Department to cooperate.

JA

Where they internally were highly organized, they have

their contact sheets, they have an internal mail system,

and they have their command and control structure where

they can task people and recruit resources and pour them

into things, and they have people available to spend on

us. Maybe there is ten thousand. So, that's, in that

particular case, the people who are pushing against us.

On the other hand, on our side, we have millions of

people around the world who support us and support our

values, who are on the other hand traditionally

completely atomized. There is no command and control

structure, they are not able to effectively coordinate with

each other, and so on. So that's the starting condition, but

of course, an organization starts to form with these

people as they find each other locally. And as they

discover each other they become optimized, that network

of nodes starts linking up and becoming more and more

efficient at comprehending its environment, planning for

JA


73 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

action and then acting. So in some ways... we have plans

to potentiate that. They are probably out by then. So we

are going to take these graphs of several million

supporters, and, do you know what simulated annealing

is?

NoES

No.JC

So when you have an alloy, or rather when you are trying

to have an alloy, you have two different metals, and the

idea is that you put these metals together, you put these

metals together and you mix them together, and they

settle. The molecules of the two different respective

metals settle into an arrangement with each other where

they are in the tightest attraction to each other. So the

lowest energy state. And to get them into this state can be

quite hard, because one molecule might be buddied up

with another to its left, but the most, the strongest

arrangement, might be if it joins the one to its right, but

it's already coupled with the one to its left, so it has to

sort of, it needs a kick to get out of the position and into

this new position... and so this is called annealing. And

you'll see that when people are making these alloys they

will knock the metals together and then let them cool and

then heat them up a bit, and then cool a bit, heat them up

a bit, and cool, and not so much each time. And they

might even do things like smack them and hit them, so

they might actually physically smash them. So we have

this system we're developing where we will put all these

people into a network which we will anneal, using a

simulated annealing method. So that there is the tightest

possible human arrangement between these million

people.

JA

Around the set of principles.ES

Around a set of principles. That's the unifier.JA


74 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

I see.ES

And then we have an efficient computational... in terms

of human computation... an efficient computational

network which can observe, plan and act.

JA

Another criticism, I think, with respect to WikiLeaks,

you were careful, according to the reports, to work to

redact sensitive information, as I understand that there

was an editing process, someone had to build a

specialized search engine because the documents were so

complicated, there was a fairly lengthy review period

with the mainstream media, you know, etc, etc, that's all

fairly well documented... now imagine another person,

not you, who does not have the same values but has the

same technology, because the technology is obviously

copiable, what happens when there is more of them than

there are of you? Or one of them and one of you?

ES

Well, sources... so who holds WikiLeaks accountable?

We have our values. How do people see whether we are

sticking to our values, or whether we betray our values?

How do people.. maybe they don't like our values...

Maybe they do. How can the human economic ecosystem

discipline us or encourage us in particular directions?

Sources speak with their feet. If sources believe that we

are going to protect them, and that we are going to have

higher impact for the material, they will simply give us

material instead of giving it to someone else. So that is

one way in which we are disciplined by the market of

sources.

JA

So it is a selection bias, basically.ES

Yeah, so the question is well, could sources pick another

group that were going to publish without any harm

minimization procedure at all? Well the answer is yes,

but one has to understand the primary reason we engaged

in harm minimization procedures. It's not primarily

because the material we release will have a reasonable

JA


75 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

risk of producing harm as a result of disclosure. That's

very rare. Rather, there is a probable risk that if we don't

engage in that sort of behaviour, our opponents will

opportunistically attempt to distract from the revelations

that we have published, very important matters, by

instead speaking about is there a potential for harm, and

therefore, is this release hypocritical, given that we want

to promote justice and is the organisation hypocritical...

and so a lot of the procedures that we engage in are not

merely to try to minimize risk to people who might be

named in the material, rather it is to minimize risk that

opportunists will reduce the impact of the material when

it is released. So part of the impact maximization that we

are doing is to prevent this type of attack on what we

publish. So from that point of view, intelligence sources

will understand that we do that in order to maximise

impact. Now that said, we do not permanently redact

anything. We only do delayed redactions. So we delay

until the security situation has changed and we can

release this, and I think that is an important difference to

what...

So is it fair to say that, eventually the things that you

redacted will be all...ES

YesJA

Will all be made availableES

All be made availableJA

That's a different question actually from what you were

asking, which was, what if the same process and

technology fell into...

LS

Yes, so I'm getting to that, so it disturbs me greatly - it is

a - and we have all sorts of other projects about

syndicating our submission system to third parties and so

on. It disturbs me that we are redacting at all. It is a very

very dangerous slippery slope. And I've already said that

JA


76 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

we go through this not merely to minimize harm but for

political considerations, to stop people distracting from

the important part of the material by instead hyping up

concerns about risks.

It's a pragmatic decision. A strategic decision.JC

It's a pragmatic, tactical decision to keep the maximum

impact there, instead of having to be distracted... But that

is us already engaging in a rather dangerous compromise.

Now it is not nearly to the same degree as the

newspapers, because we have done this collaboration

with them, and we can see that some of them are just

appalling. I mean we released these results. An analysis

of their redactions versus what actually needed to be

redacted, and it is extremely interesting.

JA

So there was a difference of view on what needed to be

redacted?ES

Oh they had... The Guardian redacted two thirds of a

cable about Bulgarian crime, removed all the names of

the people who had infiltrated - the mafioso - who had

infiltrated the Bulgarian government. Removed a

description of the Kazakstan elite, which said that the

Kazakstan elite in general were corrupt, not even a

particular name, just in general! Removed a description

that a an energy company out of Italy operating in

Kazakhstan was corrupt, so they have redacted for

naming of individual names of people who might be

unfairly put at risk, just like we do--that is what we

require of them. They have redacted the names of

mafioso, individual mafioso because they are worried

that they might get sued for libel in London by this

mafioso. They have redacted the names... they have

redacted the description of a class of Kazakhstan elite, a

class has been corrupt, and they have redacted

descriptions of individual companies being corrupt

because they don't want to expose themselves to any risk

at all. And that's true of the Irish Independent, even

though very good journalists, totally onside legally, they

JA


77 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

do this. Incredible self-censorship across the board and

they don't admit doing it or reveal the fact that they are

doing it. So we don't want to go down that path. I'm sure

all these groups started out as just no we will just do

these little redactions and then economics comes into

play and then why take the risk and so on. And so you

end up with a system of self-censorship and it is

embarrassing to do it and so why tell the public that you

are doing it, but you are not telling the public you are

doing it so it gets easier and easier to do every time. If

we look at email. Who censors email? No one censors

email! Look at a telephone call to your grandmother, is

there a censor sitting there on the line determining

whether you are about to say something bad to your

grandmother and cutting it out? Of course not. The postal

system. Are other people opening envelopes to see

whether you are sending something bad? No. Youtube,

apriori, is anyone sitting there reviewing every video

before it is posted?

Let me give you the technical answer, just so you know

it. We can't review every submission, so basically the

crowd marks it if it is a problem.

ES

Yeah, post publication.JA

Post publication.ES

So once it is out, people can take copies and it could be

spreading everywhere.JA

And what happens is the takedown of... we get into

trouble because various players want us to do

pre-publication review. But with 48 hours of youtube

video coming in every minute, we can't mechanically do

it. So there is a.. so if someone posts something wrong or

evil or violating a law, whatever, there is a gap, hopefully

short, between the time that it is published, and marked

for further review against our policies. And the policies

are well specified in a document.

ES


78 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[laughter]

Yeah.JA

It's a pretty high bar though, to take stuff down. It's not

just wrong as in factually wrong.LS

But under the way that these things work, commercial

websites have a, you know, we can decide what we want

to allow that we don't, we have a set of criteria, you can

see them, you can read them. We've got some kinds of

videos and not other kinds of videos. And you can't

violate copyright and all that kind of stuff.

ES

Well, I rather like what happened with Collateral Murder.

Collateral Murder instantly got flagged up by our

opponents as rated over 18, so nobody could see it on

Youtube without logging in. But with an embed they

could see it just fine. And so my interpretation of this is

that when there is an embed someone else's brand is on

the damn thing. And when it is not an embed, your brand

is on it!

JA

Without knowing the specifics all I can tell you is the

system is responsive to the post publication feedback.

We've had a couple of cases in youtube where there have

been ratings scams where they publish a document and

people will decide they want to demote him and so they

will give him a lot of negatives because he is being

attacked and if he becomes unfairly lower rank than he

should be, so these systems are manipulable by pressure

groups, and I would think that would be a constant in this

case.

ES

Sometimes by regimes. I mean there are some autocratic

regimes that will flag content posted by activists as

inappropriate.

JC

We've had stuff, we have posted, or by antiscientologists,JA


79 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[period of wind interference]

I think there were 5000 scientology videos were removed

from youtube when some lawyer claimed that they were

all, swore that they were all his copyright... because we

do purely political really political - I don't mean party

political, I mean political sphere and how power is

delegated - because we deal with almost purely political

material there is such scrutiny on us that if we, if we, at

least at this moment if we were to go to publish first pull

later they would go, oh, well it's too late! You've put it

out there, now there is a thousand copies!

You have a different model, right. You require human

editors.ES

Well, it is a problem, though, it is a severe problem,

because it means that in terms of scalability things are

very hard for us. That's why we have this new

syndication system where we are syndicating the editing

to various non-profits and so on...

JA

But you are finally outsourcing the human judgment,

because it's not possible today to write computer

algorithms to do this for you.

ES

I think that this human judgment actually is more... yes

there is some cost to publishing without vetting, but

actually the problems of vetting before publication are so

severe that they are a much, much greater problem. And

if you have to choose between these two, you would

choose publication without vetting.

JA

That's also interesting to us. That says you would

fundamentally prefer... you are so concerned about this

human judgment and the possibility of bias... [inaudible]

then you expose yourself to...

ES

We'd ask the source to do it. We'd put the weight if you

like on the people sending us the material: you exerciseJA


80 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

your judgement about what you send us, but everything

you send us we will publish... otherwise, we will be

compromised and other people will also try and... once

they understand that we have a lever to determine what is

published and not published, people will try and get that

lever by levering us.

I want to make sure we've got Jared, other questions,

Lisa?ES

Well, actually I have a follow up question on that, I

mean, again, we're looking futuristically, in each aspect

of the book, and what I wonder is I mean you have a

certain volume of content that you are getting right now

but at a certain point, at one point Twitter only had so

much content, and as well at a certain point it does

become so overwhelming that, to your point, there is no -

if you publish everything that gets sent at what point is

there such a mixture, is there so much content that it's

just manipulated that it essentially drowns out the

legitimate...

JC

The manipulated content will never be the issue.

Although there is something to be said for having a

perfect record, which we do at the moment. But

manipulated content will always be an insignificant

quantity of material. And the reason is it that it takes

economic work to manipulate content, to do it well you

need someone who is even more intelligent than the

person who created the original document, even more

informed. And if the whole document is going public this

is not like a news story where you give the journalist

manipulated content. You have to fool - all the opponents

and everyone else in the world with the material, so it is a

lot harder. And at the same time every organization

generates a mountain of paperwork, and internal records

just by virtue of its activities, so all of those records are

produced for free. The legitimate content will always

outweigh the manipulated content.

JA

That assumes people [inaudible]...ES


81 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[laughter]

A small amount of manipulated content can devalue a

large amount of unmanipulated content.JA

Can I disagree with you on one point. I fundamentally

believe that disinformation becomes so easy to generate

because of, because complexity overwhelms knowledge,

that it is in the people's interest, if you will over the next

decade, to build disinformation generating systems, this

is true for corporations, for marketing, for governments

and so on. And it makes the job for a legitimate journalist

that much harder, right. Because it just... and your answer

earlier was that this is fundamentally a trust problem.

Which I think is roughly correct. I would argue that it is

fundamentally a ranking problem. Ranking is based on

trust and other algorithms. It's the same conclusion. But I

think it's not in my view correct to say that there will

always be more sort of tactically correct information than

a small amount of manipulative information. It is

perfectly reasonable that the actors will see that computer

AI systems can generate a lot of stuff. You're well aware

of the document projects to write papers by computers...

ES

Yeah, I've seen those. I've seen those. Everyone always

thought that we would get flooded with those and it

never happened.

JA

But do you think [inaudible]...ES

We have had, literally, if you include, if you exclude the

nutters, going on about how over a garden party, one

night, twelve years ago, speaking to his ex wife with a

pot plant in between them, she told him that he was the

antichrist, and he understood it was true.

JA

If you exclude those cases, hah, which we get a bit of,

then the genuine attempted frauds, there have been about

20. It's just, it's extraordinary, it's almost nothing.

JA


82 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

No, well, let's argue, you could make the argument that

that's a statement about altruism and good, and that the

steps required to actually manipulate are hard enough

that you have to be pretty badly intended... the threshold

for doing that is pretty high, in other words...

ES

So what is the closest? It's the pump and dump scams in

stocks, for instance. That's the one that we see fairly

frequently, and where they push things, they've done it as

GIFs and they even have things to avail of OCR

recognition on emails...

JA

In Google's case we see lots and lots of linkfarms which

are attempting to manipulate our rankings. And we detect

them.

ES

What we are seeing now, we're seeing, HBGary this um,

intelligence contractor, hi-tech intelligence contractor

was hired by, was asked by Bank of America to submit a

tender and we got hold of their copy of the tender, we

don't know who ended up taking the tender, to take us

down. And the quote was two million a month. And they

would spread disinformation, and they would hack this

and they would target our journalists, and they had

network maps of people who supported us and they

would leverage their careers and self interests versus

their ideology etcetera. So that's there, but disinformation

has always been there. I'm not sure why it should

increase relative to the information increase we are

seeing everywhere else.

JA

This by the way is an actual... a fundamental argument

against something you and I were talking about earlier.

But we do need to resolve this. Does the rate of

disinformation...

ES

Arm wrestling maybe?JC

Don't mind that [inaudible] right?LS


83 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

I think there's more... This is actually one of the most

interesting... the whole conversation is fascinating, but

this last piece is really fascinating because it plays into

how Eric and I and Scott are thinking about, this is how

we are thinking about these chapters, it's like, imagine 10

years from now, or imagine 15 years so, for the purposes

of argument, let's imagine, 10 years from now it's very

easy not just for a large group of people sort of create

fake documents, produce them in mass, and distribute

them in mass let's assume a single individual has that

capacity through the technology platforms...

JC

You won't have Julian Assange saying it is true. So ...JA

So assume that they...JC

Or whoever...JA

He's making a more fundamental argument. He's saying

that humankind does not organize itself that way. There's

enough barriers that the moral choice if you will of me

acting to do all of that tends to sort of tends to limit the

amount of it, because otherwise there would have been

all of that.

ES

So let's assume a government which would have the

resources, the motivation to potentially...JC

They do all of that now. So strategic communications

propaganda arm of the Pengaton costs something like six

billion dollars a year.

JA

But has anyone done it through you? In other words,

government versus government using WikiLeaks...SM

We don't care if it is true.JA

... as a laundry.SM


84 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[chatter]

If it is true information we don't care where it comes

from. Let people fight with the truth, and when the

bodies are cleared there will be bullets of truth

everywhere, that's fine.

JA

But I mean that does take your editorial capacity just

back to verification...SM

Right because it's different than just saying we'll publish

everything...JC

it's a different slippery slope but it's still a slippery slope.SM

No, I think it's not at all I think it is the whole intent: Let

people fight with the truth. [inaudible; wind]JA

But they have to have, the argument is that they have to,

there has to be a choice algorithm, you have to have

some way of knowing that you are dealing with an

original source...

ES

No I understand that, but that is why the ecology is...JC

And the source needs to have... and the source can

choose the picture.LS

That's why the ecology is biased against any society

where you cannot verify. Then those people are left on

their own. WikiLeaks can't help them. WikiLeaks just

says when you get a good verification system, then we

are good. Otherwise, it's good luck, whatever.

JC

WellJA

They are verifying documents, they are not verifying

facts.LS


85 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[chatter]

But but you have...JA

No they are verifying sources.JC

No no, we don't verify sources, we verify...JA

[inaudible] evolution of technology generates more noise

[inaudible]ES

... that documents are official documents.JA

Right, they are official documents.LS

They are going to be faced with more noise [inaudible]

the question as to whether human beings prefer truth over

fiction but whether or not they can find the truth.

JC

But it's also not verifying facts.LS

But that's the core question.ES

It's not about verifying facts.JA

Well that's that'sSM

Yeah.LS

That's another argument.JC


86 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[chatter]

We have published...JA

It's about verifying documents not about verifying truth...SM

We have published all the fake documents that we have

received that were interesting - we published saying that

they were fake. JC? Like WikiForgeries?

JA

But there's not that many to bother with. Because

actually, they are not fake: on a meta level they are true

forgeries.

JA

They are very interesting in and of themselves, right?ES

Very interesting in and of themselves. One was an

attempt to influence the Kenyan election by saying that

the opposition has signed a secret agreement with the

Islamic minority to introduce Sharia law across Kenya. It

sounds ridiculous, but actually it was carefully

constructed.

JA

So how do you know if they are forgeries?JC

Well that one was hard, that was a carefully constructed

document. We checked signatures and we found the real

one, and etc. That was hard work. Usually it is not hard

work.

JA

But it requires human capital to do, right?JC

Yeah, usually someone makes an elementary mistake and

there is also incentives for giving us... It is pretty

disincentivizing to send us a forgery, because we are

perceived as being quite good at detecting them, and we

make the whole document public. So why wouldn't you

JA


87 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

just give it to a newspaper because they don't make the

document public. And you are dealing with people who

don't have expertise in that domain, so it's a lot easier to

overcome them. This bigger issue you are talking about...

let's say you don't have authenticators like us.

Authentication is hard. We can't authenticate the amount

of material we are getting in. So we have thought about

ways to deal with this, of having a great big mesh of

people and information flowing through and different

people adding their authenticators to it as it flows

through to distribute and delegate that. And that might

pan out. But what if everyone was simply just

publishing. Everyone was just publishing anonymously.

And you had no authenticators. What would happen?

Well, to begin with you would just have a flat structure.

Right, a completely flat structure, information there, let's

say is addressed by a hash or something. So structure at

all, there's this document and there is a document and so

on. And so then you will have people who will want to

influence making robots that put a whole load of garbage

everywhere. But it is not tied into any structure. So how

does anyone get to anything? Do they hear it from their

friends and then go and look at it? Do they link it into

their webpages?

It creates an influence graph of some kind..ES

Yeah, so there is some kind of influence graph that you

use to get the information. So you can flood the internet

with information, that doesn't mean you're going to flood

the influence graph with information. That is something

that's different.

JA

But that's the modern story of ranking, right? You know,

the web was full of spam, but spam gets ranked low

because of influence and the link structure and so on. I

think we should see if we can finish up. The sun is

coming on out.

ES

Ok.JA


88 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[laughter]

How do you know if you've won?LS

If I've won?JA

Lisa asked the best question of the day.JC

How do you know if you've won?ES

Well it's not possible to win this kind of thing. This is a

continuous striving that people have done for a long

time. Of course, there is many individual battles that we

win, but it is the nature of human beings that human

beings lie and cheat and deceive and organized groups of

people who do not lie and cheat and deceive find each

other and get together... and because they have that

temperament, are more efficient. Because they are not

lying and cheating and deceiving each other. And that is

an old, a very old struggle between opportunists and

collaborators. And so I don't see that going away. I think

we can make some significant advances and it is perhaps,

it is the making of these advances and being involved in

that struggle that is good for people. So the process is in

part the end game. It's not just to get somewhere in the

end, rather this process of people feeling that it is

worthwhile to be involved in that sort of struggle, is in

fact worthwhile for people.

JA

That was... satisfyingly spiritual.SM

[Laughing] You've obviously thought about this a lot.SM

Ha ha ha. [inaudible] a Maoist would say, "continual

revolution!"JA


89 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

As we are walking I'd like to ask one last question that I

was wondering along the way... Scott talked about the

subculture that's developed around all this which is a real

interesting idea for us to explore in the book because it

raises this question of, does the subculture create the

demand that leads to the creation of the technology or

does the technology in fact create the subculture. It's sort

of a interesting cause and effect.

JC

Well you know you can argue this on both sides. But I

think the technology permits the subculture. Once you

have a whole bunch of young people who can

communicate their ideas and values freely then culture

arises naturally. And that culture comes out of, yes, it

comes out of experiences and harmonizing with other

cultures, and yes, it is already in the record, but it also

comes out of the temperament of young people. The

desire to find allies and friends and share in a process,

and to remove power from old people.

JA

[laughs]LS

It's remarkable how uncreative old people are.JC

Speaking as an older person, I agree. I think part of your

intellectual argument is that you start off relatively... the

model you are using, the temperament model, you start

off with sort of human values, and then they get coopted

if you will, my words not yours, with the status model

that you are sort of forced into the structure, and that the

incentive system and the constraints put you into this box

as you get older, and that's sort of...

ES

Right, exactly. And with different systems that potentiate

different ways of transmitting wealth or communicating

values or making some types of group cognition more

efficient than others...

JA

Right, right.ES


90 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

And your argument that if you get enough of these sort of

new, this group that you identify, together, it in fact is a

summary change in these complex systems...

Right. It will be interesting to see whether we have a bit

of a... some sort of state change as well. A revolution is a

big state change, like everything was in one state and

then it collapses into another state. And those transitions

happen very quickly. It will be interesting to see whether

we will have a broader, general, globalized cultural

change that has this fast transition. It's possible.

JA

Yeah. One thing I have learned is that things happen fast

because of globalization. Cause everything is

interconnected. It didn't used to be true.

ES

So information, money, and wealth. Right. The big issue

with globalization is that you can be an arsehole and

move your money elsewhere. Fast EFTs, fast wealth

movements, fast signing of contracts, which are a type of

wealth movement--these encourage opportunism.

Because if political sanction... money can move faster

than political sanction, then you just keep moving the

money through the system. And growing it as it moves

through the system. And have it become more and more

powerful, and by the time the moral outrage comes to

stop it, it is too late, it's gone. So what's happening now

on the internet is that political sanction - by political I

mean - I use political the way Australians use it, by the

way, which is that it's not about party politics, it's about...

JA

Oh is that Australian?SM

The body politic.ES

Yeah, the body politic. Political sanction is now able to

move a lot faster than it did before. Possibly as fast as

money. Not in any individual transfer, but in the complex

structuring arrangements you need to make transfers,

these can take a while.

JA


91 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[chatter]

That's mmm...ES

Can you think of another question, Eric?SM

Julian, you've been so generous with your time. Really.JC

Do you have a bracelet?LS

I do, on my leg. It's not a bracelet, it's a manacle.JA

A manacle.LS

These conversations do tend to go on.SM

And just out of curiosity, so, as you get ready for the next

court hearing, you have to go through... the legal team

comes over and visits for the day?

ES

Well you can't come over every day out here from

London. Eight hours travelling per day. Actually I just

fired my old, part of my old legal team.

JA

Yeah, I saw that, so do you end up on the phone a lot?ES

Well, what ended up happening was that they were

charging, after promising not to, seven hundred and

thirty pounds an hour just to sit on that train coming out

from London.

JA

I see.ES


92 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[stunned chuckles]

I am rather unhappy about it.JA

But at the end of the day do you end up having visitors

every day basically? Or is this relatively...ES

Every... well, my staff or so on?JA

Yeah.ES

More interesting visitors every week or so.JA

Well I hope we have been... At least a distraction!

[Laughter]ES

We wouldn't mind a leak from Google, which would be, I

think probably all the PATRIOT Act requests.JA

Which would be [whispers:] illegal.SM

Well, depends on the jurisdiction, da da da da.JA

We are a US...SM

There's higher laws. There's higher laws. First

Amendment and you know.JA

I've actually spent quite a bit of time on this question.

Because I am in great trouble because I have given a

series of criticisms about PATRIOT 1 and PATRIOT 2.

Because I think they're... because they're non transparent.

You know, because the judge's orders are hidden and so

on. And the answer... the answer is that the laws are quite

clear about Google and the US. We couldn't do it. It

ES


93 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

would be illegal.

So we're fighting this case now, with Twitter, we've done

three court hearings now, trying to get the names of the

other companies that fulfilled the subpoenas for the

grand jury in the US. Twitter resisted and so that's how

some of us became aware. They argued that we should be

told that there was a subpoena. I wasn't told, but...

JA

And this concerning you, concerning WikiLeaks.SM

Yeah, me personally, but three other people too. Well we

know there is at least four other people.JA

I can certainly pass on your request to our general

counsel.ES

Tell them to argue that we should be told.JA

So your specific request is that Google argue legally...ES

YesJA

...that WikiLeaks as an organization should be

informed...ES

Or any of the individuals.JA

...or any of the individuals, if they are named in a FISA.ES

Yeah.JA

Okay. I'll pass that... along.ES


94 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[laughter]

Great.JA

And we'll see what comes back!ES

Tell them to bring back all the others ones as well.JA

I'm going to the rest room. Why don't we all figure out

what we are going to do next in a minute, and we'll let

Julian get back to actually running the empire. The other

thing is, in terms of running WikiLeaks, I keep asking,

no I'm just curious, running WikiLeaks, are you able? I

mean you have a staff. You have to talk to them.

ES

Yeah.JA

Call them? I mean I assume you can do email and all

that, no?ES

I don't use email.JA

Why not, because it's...?ES

Too dangerous. And encrypted email is possibly even

worse, because it is such a flag for end point attacks. It's

like, attack that end point attack that end point - that's an

encrypted [inaudible] So but we do have encrypting

phones, unfortunately they don't work in all countries,

but the SMSs work in all countries.

JA

When you speak with a staff member, would it typically

be on the phone or in person?ES

Typically in person.JA


95 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

Typically in person.ES

I've kind of gotten like [inaudible] now.JA

How big is the staff, Julian?JC

It's about 20.JA

But roughly, then, if I were to describe it, people come

and visit, you're using technology carefully to manage

things and you're well aware of people watching you, and

so forth, given..

ES

Yes.JA

And that's been true for a while, reading about...ES

That's been true for at least a year and a... well, there's

been various times, we... one of our people was

ambushed by British intelligence in Luxembourg car

park in 2008, early 2008, that was the first concrete...

JA

What did they do?ES

They followed him there to a supermarket, and when he

came out of the supermarket they were waiting by the

car. And said... a man in his 40s. Nice watch. Confident.

Tall. A James Bond. Very stereotyped. Good character.

Good shoes. And started to ask questions about

WikiLeaks and me, and told him it would be in his

interest to come and have a cup of coffee, and have a

chat about things, but it was a clear threat, it was a

supermarket car park, he could have made that approach

somewhere else, it was made in a carpark, in a

supermarket.

JA


96 of 97 13-08-2015 14:24

[end of tape]

Did he identify himself as British intelligence?LS

No.JA

Hm.ES

The accent. There is no one else like that who would be

interested. And he was told by our guy that our guy

wasn't interested in men. See you later! [laughter] Sorry

buddy! [laughter]

JA

How do we get the beginning part of what you have on

tape to transcribe, how would you like us to...LS

Well we should...JA

How should we, because he was kind of...LS

Maybe we should give it to you on... I might give it to

you now, it might be safest...JA

You don't mind? And then we'll transcribe it and send it

all back to you?LS

Yeah.JA

Could we just FEDEX it?LS

Yeah.JA

Is that... safe?LS


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Transcript of Secret Meeting Between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt